A film adaptation of Rebecca Yaross’ best-selling ballerina novel “Variations” is in the works at Amazon’s MGM Studios, Variety has confirmed.
“It Ends with Us” screenwriter Christy Hall is writing the film’s screenplay, and President Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground and American Ballet Theater veteran Misty Copeland’s Life in Motion Productions is producing. Jarosz will serve as executive producer.
The “Variation” by Yaros (best known as the author of the Fourth Wing series of romance novels, which is in development as a television series on Amazon), is about a famous ballerina who returns to her family’s Cape Cod vacation home to recover from a career-threatening injury, where she is reunited with a Coast Guard rescue swimmer she has never forgotten. As they confront unresolved feelings from their past and uncover family secrets about the tragedy that separated them, they are forced to ask themselves whether they made the wrong choices for the right reasons.
In addition to “Variations” and “The Fourth Wing,” other Yaross book-to-screen adaptations currently in production include “In the Unlikely Event” for Netflix and “The Last Letter” as a movie from Amazon MGM.
In addition to his work as a screenwriter on Colleen Hoover’s film It Ends With Us, which grossed more than $350 million worldwide, Hall’s recent projects include his directorial debut and screenplay for the feature film Daddio, starring Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson, which he also wrote. Her other credits include co-creating the Netflix series “I Am Not Healthy With This.”
She is repped by CAA, Untitled Entertainment and Yorn Levine Barnes.
Variations is the first feature film produced by Copland’s Life in Motion Productions. Productions was co-founded with Emmy Award-winning writer and producer Leila Fayyaz with a mission to “expand movement storytelling in film, television, and stage.” Under Copeland, who was named American Ballet Theater’s first Black female principal dancer in 2015 and recently retired as the company’s principal dancer, Life in Motion also produced the Emmy-nominated documentary “Lift” and the recently released documentary “Match in a Haystack,” as well as the indie short story “Flower,” which premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and was nominated for an NAACP Award.
Higher Ground’s previous film work includes the Academy Award-winning documentary “American Factory,” the recently released Netflix apocalyptic thriller “Leave the World Behind,” as well as “Rustin,” “American Symphony,” “Crip Camp,” “Fatherhood,” “Becoming” and “Worth.”
News of the “Variations” film project was first reported by The Washington Post.
