It’s been almost a decade since director James Mangold (A Complete Unknown) ventured into television, but he’s coming back with a new high-profile project for Paramount. He’s going to bring one of his first, and most acclaimed, movies to the small screen. The news comes in the wake of Mangold signing an overall deal with the studio shortly after its merger with Skydance Entertainment last year.
According to reports, Mangold is set to adapt the 1997 movie Cop Land as a TV series. Mangold will write, direct, and executive produce the project alongside Robert Levine (The Old Man), who will serve as showrunner. It’s one of many projects Mangold is involved with: there’s also a Star Wars prequel set milennia in the past, detailing the origins of the Jedi and the Sith, as well as a horror-tinged Swamp Thing movie for James Gunn‘s DC Universe. It will be the first TV project for Mangold in some time; his most recent small-screen venture was the Depression-era USA Network series Damnation, which was cancelled after a single season.
What Is ‘Cop Land’ About?
Cop Land refers to Garrison, New Jersey, a small town largely populated by Ney York Police Department officers and their families. The law in town is Freddy Heflin (Sylvester Stallone), a local whose dreams of being an NYPD cop were quashed as a young man when he lost his hearing in one ear while saving a woman from drowning. The shy, overweight Freddy turns a blind eye to the corruption of the town’s elders, including Ray Donlan (Harvey Keitel), Jack Rucker (Robert Patrick), and Joey Randone (Peter Berg), while they largely consider him a joke, save for the troubled Gary Figgis (Ray Liotta). After Donlan’s nephew, celebrated hero cop Murray ”Superboy” Babitch (Michael Rapaport), panics and kills two unarmed teens after an altercation, Donlan fakes his suicide and hides him out in Garrison. Soon, Internal Affairs officer Moe Tilden (Robert De Niro) is closing in, and Freddy will have to decide who his real friends are.
Released in 1997 by Miramax Films, Cop Land was a success with critics and audiences, and helped Mangold, who wrote and directed the film, break into the mainstream; it was his second feature, after the well-regarded indie Heavy. It also earned Stallone his best reviews in decades, after a string of critical and commercial flops.
A TV adaptation of Cop Land is in development.
via Collider