Focus Features has signed a two-year first look deal with Sam Mendes and his company Neal Street Productions. The deal also brings two projects that Mendes has been developing as potential directing vehicles.
The first is ‘Butcher’s Crossing,’ a revisionist Western novel by John Williams, the film takes place in the 1870s, focusing on a man who goes west, and looks to hunt one of the last great buffalo herds.
Also in the deal is an adaptation of the George Eliot novel ‘Middlemarch,’ another period film.