A new take on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic is headed to television

Famously adapted into Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science fiction masterpiece, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic is now being developed as a small screen telefilm. Deadline has the news, reporting that Alan Taylor is planning to helm a telefilm version that will air on WGN America.

Roadside Picnic, published in 1971, is officially described in its recent Chicago Review Press edition, as follows:

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of the extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty” something goes terribly wrong.

Taylor, who recently helmed Paramount Pictures’ Terminator Genisys, is also well-known for helming Thor: The Dark World and quite a few different HBO series, including “Game of Thrones.”

“There was a period there where I was going from ‘Sopranos’ to ‘Deadwood’ to ‘Sex in the City’ and back,” Taylor today told Zap2It of his new Roadside Picnic adaptation, “and the task of stepping into a language and a world and having to speak that language and try and uplift it and try and do it better, but also make it personal to yourself but also very much jump into an existing mythology became a craft I enjoyed doing. I think that’s the same process, in a way, of coming into Branagh’s ‘Thor’ and going, ‘OK, I see what’s going on here. I love it, but I would do this differently and that differently.’ It doesn’t feel like that different a process.”

The script for the new Roadside Picnic has been adapted by Jack Paglen (Transcendence) and will be produced by Neal Mortiz through Sony Pictures TV and Tribune Studios.

The original text of Roadside Picnic, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, is available online as a free PDF, courtesy of Coronzon Press.

Mandatory viewing for cinephiles, Tarkovsky’s Stalker was officially released to YouTube a few years ago by Russian distributor MosFilm. If you don’t have the chance to check out the film on the big screen, you can legally watch it in its entirety in the two players below.