Adaptations

Warner Brothers has bought the right to Josh Lieb’s upcoming book I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President. It’s about a 13 year old with a secret base under his house and is one of the smartest and richest people in the world, who runs for class president to please his father and finds campaigning trickier than he thought.

Gregor Jordan’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel The Informers has cut the vampires according to actor Jon Foster, "There are no more vampires. They took the vampires out. There are no zombies or monsters either. This is more about the narcissistic side of people's characters. God knows why they took the vampire characters out. I can't say if I was pleased or displeased, that is just the way it is."

Frank Darabont on making Stephen King/Richard Bachman story The Long Walk into a movie, “It’s on one of the burners on the stove you know. It’s not on the front burner at the moment but I imagine it’s going to be something that I’ll do probably within the next five years. I don’t have any immediate plans…” “That one will be very, very faithful to Stephen’s story, even more faithful then The Mist was. But it doesn’t bear a huge budget because it’s a very existential strange little story. To do it faithfully then it winds up being a strange little movie so not a blockbuster, just a very interesting film I think.”

Group TAC announced an animated movie adaptation of Kenji Miyazawa’s Guskou Budori no Denki (The Life of Guskou Budori), with Gisaburo Sugii directing and Sadayuki Murai scripting. Continuing the Miyazawa trend of having all the characters as cats, it’s set in a mythical Japan, where a boy’s little sister is mysteriously kidnapped. After he grows up he becomes a volcanologist, and devotes his life to the study of volcanoes and protecting the land. The original story was written in 1932 and is connected to, the then new, theories of the greenhouse effect.

G.I. Joe will have black hair for The Baroness, and “address some little bits of backstory never explained in the cartoon or comic like Destro's metallic head and Snake Eyes inability (or unwillingness) to talk.”

Tobey Maguire, along with Relativity Media, is on to produce Afterburn, based on Paul Ens and Scott Chitwood’s Red 4 comic book. The “story begins one year after a solar flare burns half of Earth. Treasure hunters go back to the scorched portion of the planet to retrieve valuable artifacts.”

Fumi Yoshinaga's four volume manga Antique Bakery, about four young men who run a small café named "Antique" and the importance of cake, will be made into a live action movie by South Korea's United Pictures. Joo Ji-Hoon will star and Fine Cut will handle international distribution after the movie's release later this year.

Michael Brandt will be adapting the Richard Matheson’s 1963 Twilight Zone episode Death Ship into the movie Countdown. Three astronauts land on a planet to find dead bodies near a spaceship – their dead bodies. "Countdown is fantastic because it wraps the themes of fate and predestination in a movie that is really a giant puzzle (that will also) be fun for the audience to piece together."

Dead Space, Electronic Arts' science fiction horror game, will be made into an animated direct to DVD movie by Starz' Film Roman production unit. It'll be "a prequel to the game, picking up where a comic that is being made by Image Comics leaves off." The game, which will be released this fall, is about a spaceship taken over by aliens called Necromorphs.