Zack Snyder to follow Justice League with Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead

Director Zack Snyder will be breaking from his decade or so run of comicbook movies to take on a screen adaptation of novelist Ayn Rand’s celebrated The Fountainhead.

Snyder, who helmed Watchmen, Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Justice League, had teased talk of adapting the book back in 2016.

He told The Hollywood Reporter at the time: “I have been working on The Fountainhead. I’ve always felt like The Fountainhead was such a thesis on the creative process and what it is to create something. Warner Bros. owns [Ayn Rand’s] script and I’ve just been working on that a little bit.”

Now Deadline is reporting that it will be his next project, and not, as some had been rumouring, a sequel to Justice League.

Snyder has also had another project in the offing for a decade, The Last Photograph, about a war correspondent left alone behind enemy lines in Afghanistan following an attack.

It was thought that it was set to start shooting next month, but it appears the project has been superseded.

The director was speaking with fans on the social media site Vero when he revealed his next directorial move.

The timescale of the project is not yet known, but it’s not the first time that the novel has been brought to the big screen.

It was made into a movie in 1949 by Warner Bros, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, with Rand also writing the screenplay, though it was a commercial and critical failure.

The novel centres on maverick architect Howard Roark, who shuns conformity to forge ahead designing modernist buildings.

Synder was stuck by tragedy during the making of Justice League in 2017, after his daughter Autumn took her own life.

He took a leave of absence from the production, with Joss Whedon stepping in to complete the movie.

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