Channing Tatum's Making His Directoral Debut

He's already made a number of impressive jumps in his career — from romance movie hunky leads to action movie hunky leads, from raunchy comedy to intense drama. Now Channing Tatum will be jumping from actor to director: Tatum will be making his directoral debut. And it's coming to us through a YA adaptation.

According to The Hollywood Reporter Tatum will actually be co-directing: Tatum and Magic Mike and 22 Jump Street producr Reid Carolin will co-direct and produce an adaptation of YA book Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock.

Written by Matthew Quick, Forgive Me, Leonard Pacock sounds....pretty intense. From a Booklist review by Daniel Kraus:

It’s Leonard’s eighteenth birthday and, big surprise, nobody remembered. This birthday, however, is going to count—because Leonard plans to shoot cruel bully (and former best friend) Asher Beal after school. First, though, there is the small matter of gift giving, in which Leonard delivers four presents to the four people who made his “worthless” life a little better: a noir film–loving neighbor, a violin prodigy classmate, a superhot teen evangelist, and his favorite teacher. The single-day time frame provides a good deal of claustrophobic tension, as readers will hope against hope that one of these four people will be able to deflect Leonard from his mission. But this is far from a thriller; Quick is most interested in Leonard’s psychology, which is simultaneously clear and splintered, and his voice, which is filled with brash humor, self-loathing, and bucket loads of refreshingly messy contradictions, many communicated through Leonard’s footnotes to his own story. It may sound bleak, but it is, in fact, quite brave, and Leonard’s interspersed fictional notes to himself from 2032 add a unique flavor of hope.

Whoa there.

Quick is also the novelist behind the book of another adaptation: Silver Linings Playbook, which got all kindsa Oscar nods in 2013. So far it seems as if Tatum will be playing a teacher who intervenes with Peacock's plan.