Good news for all you fans of Russian literature out there - and really, who among us is not? The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, is on its way to cinema screens from producer Scott Steindorff.
The novel, which regularly appears on Best Novel of the Century lists, sees Satan walk the Earth, hanging out with a group of literary types in Moscow, including the title characters, a despairing novelist and his married lover. Deaths and disappearances follow in the Devil's wake, and things take a turn for the seriously confusing when the action shifts into the novel that the master is writing (about Jerusalem in the time of Pontius Pilate) and a whole other, supernatural world where Satanic forces have taken over Margarita's life.
So not so much with the kittens and flowers then. To be perfectly honest, we've read the novel and didn't love it, but it's a Very Important Classic so maybe it'll be wonderful. And producer Steindorff at least has experience with literary adaptations - he also worked on The Human Stain and the recent Love In The Time of Cholera. Let's hope that this one works better.