Darren Aronofsky to Direct Machine Man

Darren Aronofsky is set to helm the pop-thriller Machine Man for Mandalay Pictures, according to Variety. The film will be based on Australian author Max Barry’s serialized online story and upcoming tome about a gadget geek and engineer working at a forward-thinking tech firm who decides to systematically replace his weaker fleshy parts with high-end titanium performance upgrades of his own design. The story was published last year, one page per day, as an online serial. Suggestions from readers were integrated into the plot as the story unfolded. The final page of Barry’s online serial was published Dec. 1. Vintage Books releases the novel next spring.

Screenwriter Mark Heyman, who worked with Aronofsky on Black Swan , will pen the adaptation for Machine Man. Aronofsky currently has a full plate as he prepares for the Dec. 3 release of Fox Searchlight’s Black Swan and negotiates a deal to direct 20th Century Fox’s Wolverine sequel. The director’s last film was the critically acclaimed The Wrestler, which garnered Oscar noms for Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei. Heyman co-produced the film.

Machine Man will be produced by Cathy Schulman via Mandalay, which has a first-look deal with Universal. Some of the other projects that Mandalay has in the works include an untitled elephant orphanage project at New Line and Martin Scorsese’s Sinatra at Universal. The company is in post on Salvation Blvd., starring Pierce Brosnan, Ed Harris, Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connelly and Marisa Tomei.