Adaptations

Joseph Delaney’s Spook’s Apprentice, the first of a six book series, has been optioned by Warner Brothers. Kevin Lima has been picked as director. It’s “about a 13-year-old boy who learns about wizardry from a forbidding old spook.”

Dreamworks’ 3-D How to Train Your Dragon will be directed by Patty Hastings. Based on the book by Cressida Cowell, a scrawny teenaged Viking must capture and tame a dragon. The voice cast includes: Gerard Butler, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, America Ferrara, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse.

Mel Gibson will adapt Robert Drewe’s novel The Drowner with his company, Icon Films. Gibson is undecided on whether he will direct or not. It’s “an epic romance set against the construction of the Mundaring Weir and the Goldfields pipeline.”

John Fusco has completed a draft of the script for Michelle Paver’s YA novel Wolf Brother, part of her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series. The movie will be live action and produced by Ridley Scott, but he doesn’t plan to direct.

Warner Brothers has the rights to Alexis Nolent’s Science fiction novel Cyclops, and is developing it for James Mangold as director. In the near future a mercenary soldier chosen to lead a squad realizes he’s fighting for commerce and not justice.

Neil Marshall’s next movie will be Universal’s Drive. Based on the James Sallis novel: “Sallis' noir-style story, set in the seamy underside of Southern California and Arizona, centers on a stuntman who moonlights as a wheelman during robberies and discovers that a contract has been put on him.” Hugh Jackman will play the stuntman.

Kenneth Johnson, creator of the 1983 miniseries V, hopes to develop a movie based on his sequel novel V: The Second Generation. "A number of the major studios have approached me, very interested, about turning it into a movie. We're exploring all of those possibilities. Certainly the fact that the second-generation novel is currently in bookstores has had an impact on people who are interested in V as a movie, because it not only indicates there's an audience for more V, ... it's [also] lovely to be able to place a hardcover novel on a desk of a studio executive. That has its own weight."

It seems that if Narnia sequel Prince Caspian doesn’t do well, Disney will move onto a Pixar produced adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series with hopes of a trilogy.

Warner Brothers has picked up Frank Miller’s Ronin comic book miniseries, in it a samurai is put in a Manhattan where cannibals roam the sewers and humans can be half machine. Sylvain White is directing and Joby Harold is scripting.

Stuart Levy, founder of American manga translation and distribution company Tokyopop, is talking to Japanese companies about turning Kei Toume’s teen psychological horror manga Lament of the Lamb into a movie. So far he has Takahiko Akiyama to direct a 120 minute 3-D, with the tentative title Love Like Blood. "…the goth-flavored tale revolves around a slightly anemic high-school boy named Blake Edwards, who meets a beautiful girl called Jira. Their relationship becomes increasingly intense — and gory — before a final twist."

Masahito Soda’s high school bicycle racing manga Shakariki! will be turned into a live action movie this September. Shinsuke Ono will direct and it’ll star Yuya Endo, Yuuichi Nakamura, Hiroki, Noriko Nakagoshi, Miho Nakai, Akira Emoto, Yoichi Nukumizu, and Taizo Harada.