Around the time my archaeology mystery The Five-Day-Dig came out, movies about ancient Rome looked like they were about to trend. I heard there was going to be a British miniseries based on Robert Harris’s bestselling novel Pompeii, that HBO planned to update the 1970s series I, Claudius, and that an Italian filmmaker had a Pompeii thriller in the works.
A year later, I haven’t seen any news on those projects, but this recent casting announcement in Variety mentions another film titled Pompeii, this one directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, the guy behind Resident Evil. The story follows Milo, a Pompeian slave, as he tries to save the woman he loves and his best friend during the fateful eruption of Vesuvius that buries the town. Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow on “Game of Thrones” is in talks to play the lead. According to moviefone.com, Christoph Waltz, Logan Lerman, Ray Stevenson, Milla Jovovich, and Luke Evans are also on tap.
Past Pompeii-centric flicks include at least half-a-dozen versions of the awful The Last Days of Pompeii, based on the novel by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, the same guy who penned the line “It was a dark and stormy night …” Another awful 1960s British series called Up Pompeii centered around a Benny Hill-esque ancient Roman.
To date, the best film ever set in the star-crossed town has to be the trippy, Spinal-Tap-like Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii from 1972. If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend it.
I’m still hoping that Pompeii movies do take off in the near future, because I wrote the first draft of The Five-Day-Dig as a screenplay — and if the right director comes along, I’d be happy to pull it back out and polish it up. 
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