Skins Movie Confirmed
(via the lovely jack thorne's twitter)
Skins the sex, drink and drug-fuelled drama that depicts teenage life as it often is rather than how parents imagine it, is to migrate to the big screen.
After a year of speculation about the E4 show, producers today confirmed that shooting would begin in September on a film to be released in summer 2011.
Steve Christian, executive producer on the film and chair of the film finance and distribution company CinemaNX, said the show - which few could accuse of presenting a sanitised picture of adolescence - was perfect for the big screen. But he added: "The biggest critics of Skins are the Skins fans so it's going to be a big challenge. The programme has this incredible fanbase despite all the characters changing."
Skins has grown in popularity with more than 1.5 million people tuning in to the start of the recent fourth series. Although its target audience is teenagers, it has become something of a guilty pleasure for curious viewers far older.
"Look, I'm a middled aged bloke with two kids, I should hate Skins but I absolutely love it," said Christian. "And then I talk to my mates, people not in the film industry, and it's the same thing - they watch it and they love it and it's all down to the quality of the production."
The show's first two series featured actors such as Dev Patel, who went on to Slumdog Millionaire, and Nicholas Hoult, who starred in last year's A Single Man. Because the show is set in a sixth form, the teenage actors were all changed for the third and fourth series and the same thing will happen for series five and six, which have already been commissioned.
Christian said the intention was to bring back characters from the first four series, but there would also be new characters. The script is being written by Jack Thorne, a regular Skins writer working with the show's creator Bryan Elsley, and another regular, Charles Martin, will direct.
The transfer to the cinema screen is a gamble and, recently, a rare thing. In the 1970s and 1980s it felt as if everything that was reasonably successful became a movie - from On the Buses to the Sweeney to, unbelievably, George and Mildred.
Christian said: "Turning TV shows into films doesn't happen so much these days, probably because there's not the material out there.But what we don't want to do is to make a 90 minute episode of Skins. It would be a complete disaster."
There is an appetite for British produced films aimed at young people, given this weekend's impressive audience figures for Streetdance 3D, which outperformed Robin Hood and made £1.8m at the UK box office - a record for a lottery funded film.
The Skins film is a co-production between Cinemanx, Film4 and Company Pictures, which makes the TV series.
Skins the sex, drink and drug-fuelled drama that depicts teenage life as it often is rather than how parents imagine it, is to migrate to the big screen.
After a year of speculation about the E4 show, producers today confirmed that shooting would begin in September on a film to be released in summer 2011.
Steve Christian, executive producer on the film and chair of the film finance and distribution company CinemaNX, said the show - which few could accuse of presenting a sanitised picture of adolescence - was perfect for the big screen. But he added: "The biggest critics of Skins are the Skins fans so it's going to be a big challenge. The programme has this incredible fanbase despite all the characters changing."
Skins has grown in popularity with more than 1.5 million people tuning in to the start of the recent fourth series. Although its target audience is teenagers, it has become something of a guilty pleasure for curious viewers far older.
"Look, I'm a middled aged bloke with two kids, I should hate Skins but I absolutely love it," said Christian. "And then I talk to my mates, people not in the film industry, and it's the same thing - they watch it and they love it and it's all down to the quality of the production."
The show's first two series featured actors such as Dev Patel, who went on to Slumdog Millionaire, and Nicholas Hoult, who starred in last year's A Single Man. Because the show is set in a sixth form, the teenage actors were all changed for the third and fourth series and the same thing will happen for series five and six, which have already been commissioned.
Christian said the intention was to bring back characters from the first four series, but there would also be new characters. The script is being written by Jack Thorne, a regular Skins writer working with the show's creator Bryan Elsley, and another regular, Charles Martin, will direct.
The transfer to the cinema screen is a gamble and, recently, a rare thing. In the 1970s and 1980s it felt as if everything that was reasonably successful became a movie - from On the Buses to the Sweeney to, unbelievably, George and Mildred.
Christian said: "Turning TV shows into films doesn't happen so much these days, probably because there's not the material out there.But what we don't want to do is to make a 90 minute episode of Skins. It would be a complete disaster."
There is an appetite for British produced films aimed at young people, given this weekend's impressive audience figures for Streetdance 3D, which outperformed Robin Hood and made £1.8m at the UK box office - a record for a lottery funded film.
The Skins film is a co-production between Cinemanx, Film4 and Company Pictures, which makes the TV series.