The Final Girls director Todd Strauss-Schulson takes the helm of horror film Rats!

During the pandemic, director Todd Strauss-Schulson made a 4 minute short film called Rat, which was about “a lonely rat in New York City that finds love and dances the night away.” Now, Variety reports that Strauss-Schulson is set to direct the survival horror feature film Rats!, but it has no connection to his short film other than the fact that it’s set in New York City and will have rats in it.

Strauss-Schulson wrote the Rats! screenplay with Paul Sado, whose previous credits include the Adam Sandler movies Leo and The Cobbler. The story Strauss-Schulson and Sado crafted for this one puts New York City in a race against time to stop a killer rat infestation unlike anything the world has ever seen. The concept and setting brings to mind the 2002 movie The Rats (which was based on a James Herbert novel that was actually set in London), but it doesn’t appear that Rats! has anything to do with that movie or James Herbert.

Lionsgate and producer Paul Brooks have partnered on the worldwide rights to the project and Lionsgate will be presenting it to potential buyers at the Cannes market. Lionsgate and Brooks previously worked together on the 2022 horror film Prey for the Devil. In addition to Brooks, the film’s producers are producers on include Adam Fishbach (Narcos) and Jason Fuchs, who happens to be the co-creator and co-showrunner of the upcoming HBO series It: Welcome to Derry. Fuchs was also a co-producer on It: Chapter Two.

Strauss-Schulson’s directing career stretches back nearly thirty years. Credits include the slasher horror comedy The Final Girls, A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas, the unaired Disney Channel pilot Zombies and Cheerleaders, the Rebel Wilson rom-com Isn’t It Romantic, and episodes of The Inbetweeners, Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin, Glamorous, and Chad.

I’m totally on board to watch a deadly rat infestation movie from the director of The Final Girls, so I’m looking forward to seeing how Rats! will turn out. Does Rats! sound like an interesting project to you? Share your thoughts on the new Todd Strauss-Schulson movie by leaving a comment below.

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