(L-R) Anne Hathaway and ‘Yesteryear’ author Caro Claire BurkeMichael Buckner for Deadline/Riley Haakon
EXCLUSIVE: Amazon MGM Studios has won an auction and is in final talks to turn the upcoming Caro Claire Burke novel Yesteryear into a film. Anne Hathaway is attached to star and produce. Sources in the publishing community said the film deal landed in the area of $450,000 against $2 million. The studio declined to comment.
Deadline revealed the hot summer auction when four studios were in the mix. Caro Claire Burke has had work published in The Atlantic and Marie Claire, has an ongoing short story project called Cover Stories that has a following on Instagram and Substack, and is an editor at Katie Couric Media. On the publishing front, Yesteryear had 15 publishing houses bidding and was won by Knopf in a big money deal. UTA brokered the movie auction. Hathaway will produce through the Somewhere Pictures banner along with Guymon Casady, Suzan Bymel & Alexandra Holcomb of Entertainment 360.
Yesteryear is about Natalie, a woman who lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse on a working ranch is rustic and artfully cluttered, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy, her oldest daughter beginning to ask questions about whether her mother is a “trad wife”? What Natalie’s followers — all 8 million of them — don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re just jealous. Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal of what life should be — and just so happens to be building an empire from it.
Then she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren — they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is lit by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren are dirty and disheveled, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Her “daughter” informs her it’s 1805 — where just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade sourdough for her Instagram, she’s now expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her hands bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? Already reckoning with forces beyond her control, when Natalie becomes pregnant with her new “husband’s” 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥, it quickly becomes apparent that it doesn’t matter how she got here — all that matters is how she gets out.
It plays out, evocative of The Stepford Wives mixed with Leave the World Behind, with a bit of Black Mirror in there and the kind of biting social commentary Margaret Atwood was known for.
The Amazon MGM execs in the mix had a plan that wowed the author. Hathaway is repped by CAA and Entertainment 360. The author is repped by UTA.
