Working Title Films built its reputation on the well-appointed interiors of British cinema — the romantic comedies, the prestige biopics, the corseted literary adaptations engineered for the awards circuit. Handing Joe Wright a scorched, class-ravaged climate dystopia is a deliberate step off that terrain, and for Wright it may be the boldest genre pivot of a career that has never sat still.

The two-time BAFTA winner is attached to direct a feature adaptation of ‘Juice,’ Tim Winton’s post-apocalyptic novel, with Working Title having optioned the rights and set Abi Morgan to write the screenplay, as Deadline first reported. Morgan — the BAFTA- and Emmy-winning writer of ‘The Hour,’ ‘Shame’ and ‘The Iron Lady’ — has built a career turning charged political material into intimate character study, precisely the tension Winton’s book runs on.

Published in 2024 and longlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize, ‘Juice’ imagines a future Australia liquefied by heat, where survivors shelter underground for months at a stretch and civil order has curdled into roving banditry. The novel frames its history as a confession: an unnamed man and a child, captured by a stranger in an abandoned mine, buy their survival with the story of how he was radicalised into a clandestine resistance — one tasked with hunting the isolated dynasties whose emissions engineered the catastrophe. It is a revenge structure that reframes climate collapse as a crime with named culprits rather than an abstract forecast.

For Wright, whose most decorated work runs from ‘Pride & Prejudice’ and ‘Atonement’ to the Churchill chamber-piece ‘Darkest Hour,’ ‘Juice’ is a first real excursion into speculative fiction — closer in ambition to the stylised action of ‘Hanna’ than to the drawing rooms that made his name. It also reunites him with Working Title, the company behind ‘Darkest Hour’ and ‘Anna Karenina,’ on far riskier commercial ground: a hard-edged, future-set thriller with no franchise scaffolding and a distinctly literary pedigree.

The move lands amid a widening appetite for prestige speculative fiction, as filmmakers known for restraint rather than spectacle are increasingly handed the genre’s biggest swings. Winton, one of Australia’s most garlanded novelists, rarely licenses his work to the screen, which raises the stakes on getting the tone of his bleakest book right. No cast, budget or start date has been announced.

Whether Wright can carry the tactile, hand-built beauty of his period films into a sunburned wasteland is the wager Working Title is making — a costume-drama sensibility pointed, for once, at the end of the world.

Tags: Abi Morgan, adaptation, Joe Wright, Juice, Tim Winton, Working Title