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Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong has said that plans for a big-screen adaptation of their seminal album ‘American Idiot’ have been “pretty much scrapped”.
The politically-charged 2004 album was responsible for reviving the US band’s career, and was later adapted into a Tony-winning musical which spawned productions across the globe.
It was initially reported in 2011 that Tom Hanks was interested in producing a big screen adaptation of the project, before the film was finally confirmed in 2013 and playwright Rolin Jones revealed he was ‘finishing up’ the script in 2014.
But after spending years in development hell, Armstrong told NME that the project has been placed firmly on ice.
It comes after Armstrong previously said that HBO had finally given the go-ahead to the long-gestating project.
“We’ve got a green light from HBO, and the script is currently going through a couple of rewrites here and there, so I’m not sure when exactly we’re going to start shooting, but it’s definitely all systems go at the moment,” he told NME in 2016.
Read more: The Big Read – Green Day: “We live our lives as if we have nothing”
The punk icon was speaking for this week’s Big Read and also revealed that Donald Trump attended the musical’s opening night in New York.
Explaining his unlikely attendance, Armstrong said: “At the beginning of ‘American Idiot’ there’s a montage of all this pop culture garbage, one being ‘American Idol’, and another was him saying: ‘You’re fired!’,” he says.
“So that’s the reason he came, because he’d heard that his face was going to be on the screen. He’s a sociopath, you know?”
Last month, Armstrong also revealed that he wants the band to re-record their sixth album, ‘Warning’.
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