'Shockwave': Celebrated Playwright Tom Stoppard To Pen Cary Joji Fukunaga's Hiroshima Movie

Cary Joji Fukunaga has managed to land stage legend Tom Stoppard, Oscar-winning writer of Shakespeare in Love and celebrated playwright behind classics like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, to pen his upcoming movie about the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, Shockwave. Based on Stephen Walker's non-fiction book Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima, the film will be Fukanaga's follow-up to his highly anticipated Bond outing, No Time to Die.

In a recent Wall St. Journal interview, Fukunaga revealed that Oscar winner Tom Stoppard is set to pen the script for Shockwave, the No Time to Die director's upcoming movie about the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945.

Here is a synopsis of Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima from Amazon:

A riveting, minute-by-minute account of the momentous event that changed our world forever.

On a quiet Monday morning in August 1945, a five-ton bomb—dubbed Little Boy by its creators—was dropped from an American plane onto the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On that day, a firestorm of previously unimagined power was unleashed on a vibrant metropolis of 300,000 people, leaving one third of its population dead, its buildings and landmarks incinerated. It was the terrifying dawn of the Atomic Age, spawning decades of paranoia, mistrust, and a widespread and very real fear of the potential annihilation of the human race.

Author Stephen Walker brilliantly re-creates the three terrible weeks leading up to the wartime detonation of the atomic bomb—from the first successful test in the New Mexico desert to the cataclysm and its aftermath—presenting the story through the eyes of pilots, scientists, civilian victims, and world leaders who stood at the center of earth-shattering drama. It is a startling, moving, frightening, and remarkable portrait of an extraordinary event—a shockwave whose repercussions can be felt to this very day.

The project has been in development at Universal for several years, and is being produced by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner via their Working Title Films banner, which initially developed the project with Drive writer Hossein Amini. The film is based on Walker's non-fiction book of the same name, which tells a historical account of the days leading up to the nuclear bomb that devastated the Japanese countryside and killed over 100,000 civilians.

Shockwave will be Fukunaga's follow-up feature to No Time to Die, the upcoming James Bond film starring Daniel Craig which was recently delayed to April 2021. Fukunaga has made a mark as one of the most visually striking rising filmmakers with critically acclaimed films like Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre and Beasts of No Nation and his singular style on True Detective and Maniac. He has recently signed up to direct three episodes of the WWII-era limited series Masters of the Air for Apple, but Shockwave will likely be an immensely personal project for the half-Japanese filmmaker. And with a hugely accomplished writer like Stoppard, who has written such memorable fare as Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, Shakespeare in Love, and Brazil (co-written with Terry Gilliam), Fukunaga is on track for an anticipated follow-up film.