Sydney Sweeney is set to star in and produce a feature adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country, with Josie Rourke directing from her own script. StudioCanal is backing the project through its partnership with Rabbit’s Foot Films, positioning the film as a prestige play built around one of American literature’s most famously unsentimental heroines.
Sweeney will play Undine Spragg, a Midwestern striver who arrives in New York determined to buy her way into high society, then keeps climbing through marriages and calculated reinvention. Wharton wrote the character as both satire and warning: a woman who understands the marketplace of wealth and status better than the people who pretend it doesn’t exist. Britannica describes Undine as driven by social ambition and greed, with relationships that sour when they stop delivering what she wants.
The film marks another attempt to bring Undine to the screen after years of stalled development. A planned limited series at Apple collapsed after Sofia Coppola said executives balked at centering an “unlikeable woman,” a candid admission that turned Wharton’s century-old provocation into a current industry argument about who gets framed as watchable. That history gives Rourke and Sweeney a clear challenge: make Undine legible without sanding down her edge.
The financing trail also suggests sustained interest in the property. A version of Rourke’s adaptation previously appeared on funding slates in Germany in 2024, indicating the project had been moving through international packaging before landing in its current form. StudioCanal’s involvement keeps the film in the European sales ecosystem, a lane that can support period storytelling with global casting heat.
Wharton’s novel remains a sharp portrait of aspiration colliding with money, marriage, and reputation, and publishers still pitch it that way today, calling it a “biting satire” of the marriage market and Gilded Age snobbery. A film version led by Sweeney now tests how much appetite modern audiences have for a heroine who treats love like leverage and rarely apologizes for it.
