Black Phone director Scott Derrickson got a new Joe Hill project set up at Screen Gems

Back in 2021, director Scott Derrickson brought a film based on author Joe Hill’s short story The Black Phone to the screen – and he thought that was going to be the end of it, until a phone call from Hill inspired him to start working on a sequel. Released by Universal, as its predecessor was, Black Phone 2 reached theatres this year… and in an interview with Mashable, Hill revealed that Derrickson also helped him get a separate project set up at Sony’s Screen Gems.

During the interview, Hill revealed that he writes a screenplay every year so he can receive healthcare insurance through the Writers Guild of America union, something that really came in handy recently when his wife had to undergo a costly surgery while fighting cancer. He is working on a script right now to make sure he’ll still have access to that health insurance, and he told Mashable, “Right now I’m revising a screenplay that I was paid for for 2025. The script I’m working on now is an adaptation of an unpublished novella that I’d written that will be published eventually.” Derrickson helped him get the project set up because “He treated it like we were talking about his family healthcare. He’s like, ‘We’re booking you a gig.’ And, you know, we talked about possibilities, and then I sent him this novella I had written that hadn’t been published, and a pitch for how I’d adapt it, and he got psyched. And he’s like, ‘We gotta do this.’ And so he got me the gig to write the script. Now I’m revising it for Sony Screen Gems.“

Hill did not mention the name of the novella his screenplay is based on – but, two years ago it was announced that genre regular Gary Dauberman was going to be producing a film called Ushers for Screen Gems, based on an unpublished Joe Hill story. At the time, the story was supposed to be included in an anthology called New Demons, but that anthology got cancelled.

When Ushers was announced, the screenplay being written by Zak Olkewicz, whose previous credits include The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Bullet Train, and Fear Street: Part Two – 1978. We haven’t heard anything more about the project since then, so there’s a chance that the scripting duties ended up being passed over to Hill. Or maybe the script he’s writing is something other than Ushers. We’ll have to wait and see how it turns out.

Are you glad to hear there’s a Joe Hill project in the works at Screen Gems, Ushers or not? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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