This really shouldn’t be much of a surprise to long time readers of this blog, since we first announced that it was in the works 2 years ago. Although at the time it wasn’t clear whether it was a done deal, or just a passing fancy.

So it’s good to know that it is a very real project that he’s definitely working on (as he shares in the video clip below), even though there are still necessary steps ahead of him, that might prove challenging. Notably financing. 

It’s also worth noting that he says it’ll be a play, not a musical, which some of us expected it would be.

Potentially energized during his stint as director of Mike Tyson’s one-man show, "Undisputed Truth," 2 years ago, Spike Lee is currently working to bring his seminal 1989 film "Do The Right Thing" to Broadway as a play. Back in 2012, he would only say that he was talking to James Nederlander about it (James Nederlander was the producer of "Undisputed Truth").

He didn’t share much more than that, which is why I said above that it wasn’t clear whether it was actually happening, or just talk. 

Clearly, it is happening.  

It’s a movie that I think actually lends itself very well to the stage, although if I were to recommend any of Spike’s films for a stage adaptation, it would instead be "School Daze"… and as a musical, not a play. But I can see almost the entire "Do The Right Thing" set – that single block, on Stuyvesant Avenue, between Quincy Street and Lexington Avenue, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn – on stage. It’s a film with a very kind of rigid, stagy presentation, we could say, and I think it’ll work.

Spike doesn’t say when we can expect the Broadway adaptation of the film, but he’s definitely working on it. Watch and listen below (he also treats us to some of that old Spike Lee humor).