MGM, Plan B, Harpo Films and Maceo-Lyn have hired Nia DaCosta, director of the hit Candyman remake, to helm The Water Dancer adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates from his novel of the same name.
Coates’s production company Maceo-Lyn, Plan B and Harpo Films are producing the film which Young Hiram Walker, a man who was born into bondage and lost his mother as a child. Years later Walker survives when he crashes a carriage into a river and is saved by a mysterious power he never realised he had and struggles to understand.
The Water Dancer marks a second collaboration between Plan B and Coates, who are in development on the feature Wrong Answer with director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan.
DaCosta’s first film, Neon’s Little Woods starring Tessa Thompson and Lily James, was developed through the Sundance Institute and premiered at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. She followed that with MGM’s Candyman distributed by Universal Pictures, which opened in August 2021 and became the first film directed by a Black woman to open at number one in North America.
She is currently in post-production on Marvel’s 2023 release The Marvels starring Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris and Iman Vellani.
Plan B has several projects set at MGM under their overall second-look feature film deal including Sarah Polley’s anticipated Women Talking, which Plan B produced with Hear/Say productions for MGM’s Orion Pictures; Cory Finley’s adaptation of M.T. Anderson’s Landscape With Invisible Hand with producers Annapurna Pictures; an original film from Minari writer-director Lee Isaac Chung.
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