David Fincher will direct ‘Mank’ biopic for Netflix

David Fincher will be directing his first feature film since 2014, and he’s making it for Netflix .

The director of “Seven” and “The Social Network” already helped kick off Netflix’s original content boom by directing episodes of “House of Cards” and “Mindhunter.” In fact, the popularity of Fincher’s films on Netflix was famously one of the reasons the streamer’s executives felt comfortable spending hundreds of millions of dollars on “House of Cards.”

As reported in Variety, Fincher’s new film is currently titled “Mank.” It will be a biopic starring Gary Oldman as screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who shared credit (and the film’s only Academy Award) with director Orson Welles for writing “Citizen Kane.”

While it’s not clear what stance the film will take toward Mankiewicz and Welles, it’s worth noting that some cinephiles (including the critic Pauline Kael) have argued that Mankiewicz deserves more credit for the greatness of “Kane,” which is commonly described as the greatest movie of all time.

This sounds like a passion project for Fincher, particularly since the initial script was written years ago by his father Jack, who died in 2003.

It’s also a vein of film history that Netflix tapped last year by financing the completion of Welles’ final film, “The Other Side of the Wind.”