The Midnight Library Movie has Florence Pugh Expanding Her Career with Literary Epics

Florence Pugh once said that her role, Dani, in Midsommar (2019), took a major toll on her mental health, and she cannot exhaust herself like that in the future. She has stood true to her words once again as the news of her upcoming project is now in the limelight.

The Midnight Library movie is her next-up fantasy drama feature, which has been bought by Paramount Pictures for owning the distribution rights. According to Deadline, Pugh will star as well as produce the film based on Matt Haig’s best-selling novel. Haig will also serve as the executive producer. 

Haig is also happy that the story is in “great hands” and that with the relentless hard work of the entire team, there could be marvelous new possibilities that the story could take life on the big screen. He shared that he cannot wait for his story to leave the book pages and be premiered in theaters.

The film will be directed by Garth Davis (Lion), whose screenplay is written by Laura Wade and Nick Payne. StudioCanal and Blueprint Pictures are also behind the project. StudioCanal aims to bring the movie to the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand. It is known to be the biggest-budget Euro studio movie ever announced to date.

The film is planned to enter pre-production preps at the start of 2027, which means it could set a release date somewhere in 2028. No official confirmation from the distributor has been made yet. 

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What is The Midnight Library movie about?

First published in 2020, The Midnight Library has sold millions of copies and has been translated into 56 languages. The story follows Nora Seed (to be played by Pugh), who finds herself stuck in a library between life and death. With different pages and chapters, she experiences a new life where she gets a chance to rewrite her story. 

Having Pugh play Nora Seed, who is a complex and dynamic protagonist of the novel, would show the personality transformation throughout the film. Pugh has successfully done it before, such as in her recent Thunderbolts* (2025), where her character was initially affected by trauma, moral ambiguity, and shifting loyalties, but eventually, she managed to show toughness and believe in her own strength. 

This is the performance style that aligns closely with Seed’s character, a character that drifts between multiple lives, indecisive of which one to choose, reflecting upon different versions of herself, and then landing in grounded realism with self-discovery. Pugh is an apt choice to demonstrate those internal changes, small shifts in behavior, expression, and tone that balance vulnerability, toughness, and power beautifully. 

Even the director praised her work by saying, 

“I couldn’t be more excited to reunite with Florence Pugh on The Midnight Library…Her warmth and talent are magical, and together I know we’ll do something special working with Matt’s iconic novel. This is a story that moves us both — a celebration of life in all its possibility and complexity.” [Source]

Across her career, Pugh has played similar roles that start with constrained emotional states and evolve into psychologically strong mannerisms. In films like Little Women (2019) and The Wonder (2022), both literary adaptations, Pugh demonstrates a strong ability to communicate internal transformation with controlled facial expressions and suitable changes in voice that add weight to her characters. 

The emotional honesty she brings to the flawed character is lauded each time, and this is why her role as Nora Seed matches perfectly with her energies. Seed’s story requires an actor who can hold multiple emotional truths at once, and Pugh is skilled in inhabiting the exact craft.