Harmony Korine Just Resurrected Hip-Hop Drama ‘The Trap’ Almost 10 Years Later — but Now It Will Be Anime

Harmony Korine is making his animated debut with his long-gestating “The Trap,” though without its original stars and in a whole new medium. The filmmaker was first set to reunite with “Spring Breakers” stars James Franco and Gucci Mane back in 2016 for the feature, which was then set up at Annapurna as a live-action film.

Back then, Benicio del Toro, Al Pacino, and Jamie Foxx were also attached to star in the film. The feature floundered for years, and Korine is now resurrecting the project at his multimedia design collective EDGLRD. Variety first reported the news. Korine’s “The Trap” will now be an animated adventure and EDGLRD is in discussions with production partners in Japan.

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The film is described “as ‘Oldboy’ set through a hip-hop filter, ‘The Trap’ imagines another sun-kissed gangster saga, following an ex-con newly released from prison and deadset on revenge once he learns that his one-time accomplice has become a top-selling rapper.” The first EDGLRD release, “Aggro Dr1ft,” premiered in September 2023.

Meanwhile, Korine is on pre-production on a comedy, also from an earlier script the director was in development on years prior. “Comedy is at the core of Harmony’s work,” EDGLRD film strategy head and former IndieWire executive editor Eric Kohn told Variety. “So people will be pleasantly surprised when they find out more, because this a very familiar style for him while a bit more intimate than what people are used to seeing.”

As for the speed of EDGLRD productions, Kohn continued, “We can take a concept, move on it quickly, we can get it done as quickly as possible rather than killing this creative drive in development hell. … The film marketplace, especially in the U.S., is very, very narrow. If you only think about box office as a metric for success from an exhibition standpoint, you’re cutting off other ways to think outside the box. If you don’t continually reinforce this idea that movies can travel, that media can travel to different kinds of frameworks for how it’s experienced, then people default to one mode. Right now, I think especially younger audiences don’t want their options limited.”

He added, “We want to bring in a new generation of storytellers from unexpected places. You never know where you might encounter something that you’ve never seen before, whether that’s a Twitch stream or a Reddit forum or some short film that was posted to YouTube. I don’t think the industry has necessarily embraced the opportunity of bringing those kinds of voices in.”

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