Kurt Cobain’s last days are the basis for an upcoming opera. Or, more accurately, Last Days, Gus Van Zant’s 2005 film about the impending suicide of a Cobain stand-in named Blake, is becoming an opera.

As The Guardian reports, London’s Royal Opera House is adapting Van Zant’s movie into an opera. The ROH’s composer in residence Oliver Leith, who composed the opera, is 32 years old, meaning he was only four when Cobain killed himself on April 5, 1994. (Yes, yesterday was the 28th anniversary of his death.) However, Leith is said to be a “massive” Nirvana fan. He told The Guardian Cobain’s narrative is “an archetypal story — operas deal well in those” and that Van Zant had not sensationalized Cobain’s story.

The Last Days libretto is by Matt Copson, who’ll direct the show along with Anna Morrissey. It’ll be staged in the ROH’s Linbury Theatre in October. According to a statement from the Royal Opera House, the Last Days opera “plunges into the torment that created a modern myth.” Blake, the protagonist, is “haunted by objects, visitors and memories distracting him from his true purpose – self-destruction.” I wonder if these contributors all went out to see The Batman together to get in the right headspace.

Our own Tom Breihan recently blogged about Last Days in a Number Ones column centered on, of all acts, Boyz II Men.