The Troop Movie Is in the Works at Paramount Primal

Paramount Primal has acquired the rights to The Troop, bringing Nick Cutter’s acclaimed horror novel back into active movie development.

Chris Basler has been brought aboard to write the adaptation, while Lyrical Media is producing the film.

No director or cast is publicly attached, and no release date has been announced, so the project remains in the early stages.

Still, after years of attempts to turn the novel into a movie, having a studio and screenwriter attached gives this incarnation some real momentum.

The Troop follows a group of boys heading out on their annual scout camping trip when an unexpected visitor arrives.

That encounter unleashes something far more terrifying than any story they could have told around the campfire.

As the situation deteriorates, the isolated group finds itself fighting for survival while fear and infection begin turning the boys against both the threat surrounding them and each other.

It’s a wonderfully horrible setup for a movie.

You’ve got isolation, paranoia, survival horror and a group of characters with nowhere easy to run when everything starts going wrong.

And that’s before getting into the body horror that helped give Cutter’s novel its reputation.

This isn’t the first attempt to bring The Troop to the screen.

The novel has spent years travelling through various stages of Hollywood development, with earlier efforts including an adaptation involving James Wan’s Atomic Monster.

Cutter discussed the project earlier this year, explaining that attempts to adapt the book went through numerous iterations over roughly a decade.

At the time, he revealed that the rights were with Lyrical Media and that the company had a script it liked.

Now Paramount Primal has entered the picture.

That doesn’t mean cameras are about to start rolling tomorrow — plenty can still happen during development — but this is another significant step toward finally getting The Troop on screen.

Published in 2014, The Troop was written by Craig Davidson under his pen name, Nick Cutter.

The book subsequently won the James Herbert Award for Horror Writing and developed a reputation among horror readers for its particularly gruesome approach to body horror.

That makes the movie's eventual tone one of the biggest questions surrounding the adaptation.

The premise alone gives the filmmakers plenty to work with, but much of The Troop’s identity comes from just how uncomfortable and unpleasant Cutter is willing to make things.

If Paramount Primal and the filmmakers embrace that side of the material rather than sanding down its edges, this could become a very different kind of survival horror movie.

There’s currently no release date for The Troop movie, and no director or cast has been announced.

With Chris Basler working on the adaptation, the project remains firmly in development.

The next major updates we’ll be watching for are a director signing on, casting announcements and eventually confirmation that production is moving forward.

After so many years of attempts to bring Nick Cutter’s novel to the screen, however, The Troop is alive again.

Given what happens in the book, perhaps “alive” isn’t quite as reassuring as it normally sounds.

Please Rewind will keep you updated as we hear more.