EXCLUSIVE: Muse Films, an outfit behind films like Spring Breakers, The Virgin Suicides, and American Psycho, has acquired the film rights to New Millennium Boyz, a recent novel by Alex Kazemi.
Chris and Roberta Hanley will produce the adaptation for the company, with Kazemi co-writing alongside Brittany Menjivar (Evidence, Fragile.com).
Set during the Y2K era, New Millennium Boyz follows suburban teen Brad Sela, whose life unravels after he falls in with two volatile new friends. As they document their increasingly transgressive exploits on Handycams, Brad is pulled deeper into chaos on the brink of the new millennium.
The book was published by Permuted Press in the fall of 2023.
Muse Films seems a natural fit to produce New Millennium Boyz, given its edgy, provocative, and visually distinctive earlier work on films like American Psycho, as well as Spring Breakers and Bully, other portraits of youth on the edge
“Working with Chris and Roberta Hanley has been something I’ve been dreaming about since I was 15 and discovered indie cinema,” said Kazemi in a statement to Deadline. “I’m incredibly grateful and ecstatic for my novel to be in the hands of film icons, and for the Y2K pop art I’ve created to become part of the Muse Films legacy.”
Roberta Hanley said that when she read Kazemi’s novel, “I felt a Proustian level of attention to social detail about the ’90s. I saw a young Bret Easton Ellis’s DNA. Kazemi is the kind of writer who fires off these psycho beautiful sound bites that demand attention—even from the most distracted millennials.”
Added Chris Hanley, “Kazemi’s NEW MILLENNIUM BOYZ fits within the Muse oeuvre. The novel captures the base reality of the Y2K generation—caught between a disappearing past and an uncertain future, their world is about to end as they know it.”
A Canadian pop artist, journalist, and author, Kazemi previously wrote Pop Magick: A Simple Guide to Bending Your Reality, a 2020 book designed to empower readers to shape their lives through intention, ritual, and self-discipline through occult practices. His debut novel was Yours Truly, Brad Sela back in 2013. The author is repped by CAA and Avalon.
