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The film adaptation of Michelle Zauner‘s best-selling memoir Crying in H Mart, first announced as in development in 2023, is currently on hold.
Zauner, who was tapped to adapt her tale into a screenplay, is best known as the frontwoman of the Grammy-nominated indie band Japanese Breakfast. She revealed the halt in the project in a recent interview and spread with lux fashion house SSENSE’s magazine.
“Well, it’s on pause. There were issues with the Hollywood strikes, and the director stepped away from the project,” Zauner said when asked about the film’s progress. “I spent a year working on the screenplay, which was a tough but rewarding process. I still have faith it will get made someday, but it’s not happening anytime soon. Right now, I’m focusing on other creative projects, so the film will have to wait.”
The White Lotus Season 2 star Will Sharpe was announced as the director for MGM’s Orion Pictures project. The beloved memoir — which spent 60 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has been immensely successful with a 17th issue reprinting in Korea — follows Zauner’s coming-of-age story as a daughter to a Korean mother and Jewish American father, who returns to her small Oregonian town to care for her mom amid her cancer diagnosis. Told through the lenses of Korean cuisine and the power of music, the book traces the oftentimes tumultuous relationship between strict mother and free-spirited daughter.
Sharpe, who has directed a number of projects, including the Benedict Cumberbatch-starring period drama The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain, will next be seen in Lena Dunham’s rom-com series for Netflix, Too Much, opposite Megan Stalter. As for Zauner, Japanese Breakfast will soon go on tour in support of the forthcoming album For Melancholy Women (& Sad Brunettes), due March 21.
Speaking with SSENSE, Zauner also teased a new novel, “The book will take at least two more years to write. I’ve been keeping a diary for the past year—over 500,000 words of raw material. Next year, I’ll start weaving it into a narrative. It’s very different from Crying in H Mart because this one’s written in real time, not retrospectively. It’s going to be a long process, but I’m excited about it.”
