For this week’s Movie Monday, we’re introducing 7 new books that we’ll be adding to our list of 60+ upcoming YA Adaptations! There are some awesome sounding books on this list! Which story are you most excited about? Do you have any fan casting ideas!? Let us know!
The Fifth Wave: The Fifth Wave, Rick Yancey’s bestselling alien evasion novel has been picked up by Sony Pictures and is moving full speed ahead! The studio, with producers Graham King and Tobey Maguire, have already named Susannah Grant to pen the script (Erin Brockovich) and is in talks with J Blakeson, who gained notoriety with his 2009 cult hit “The Disappearance Of Alice Creed”. The studio is hoping that this big hit novel, which already has fans begging for a follow up, will be there next big franchise.
Panic: Bestselling author Lauren Oliver’s upcoming book Panic has been optioned to become a movie by Universal after a bidding war last month. The book won’t be published until March next year, and is about a small town in which seniors take part in a dangerous and deadly game where the stakes are high and the payoff even higher. Marc Platt will produce the project for Universal, which is keeping plot details under wraps.
The Young World- This past June a heated bidding war took place , which resulted in Warner Bros. securing the yet-to-be-published rights to The Young World. This is the first book in an original trilogy of post-apocalyptic YA novels by filmmaker-turned-novelist Chris Weitz. The movie deal came less than 15 months after Weitz’s signed his first book deal, which Little Brown will publish in 2014. Perhaps both the publishing and film industry have high hopes for the director of Twilight: New Moon and The Golden Compass adaptations. Weitz will adapt, direct and produce his story which is about teenage survivors who inherit a destroyed and desolate earth, after a cataclysmic event kills off every person not between the ages of 12 and 21. Without water, heat or any of the things they’ve grown up with, they must figure out how to save the world.
The Fire Sermon- A few months ago, Dreamworks snagged the rights to The Fire Sermon, the first book in a trilogy written by short story author and poet Francesca Haig. Deadline reports the plot of the book as such: 400 years after a nuclear apocalypse, society is left without technology and all humans are twins. One of each pair is physically perfect, and they are called Alphas, while the other, the Omega, bears some mutation. The apartheid society forces the mutated twins to settlements, even though when one twin dies, so does the other. This is the relationship between a brother and sister twin, and what happens when he becomes a leader in the repressed society.
Gallagher Girls Book Series: Ally Carter (which is the pen name for author Sarah Leigh Fogleman) has another adaptation in the works! The six-book young-adult series centers on a student, Cammie Morgan, at the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women in Roseville, Va. While the school poses as an institution for highly intelligent girls, it’s actually a training facility for the CIA. Producers Tonya Lewis Lee and Nikki Silver, operating under their new Tonik Productions banner, have optioned film rights to the book series with an eye toward establishing a big-screen franchise. They are also currently working on another YA adaption, The Giver, which is currently being filmed in South Africa.
Children of Paranoia: This Young Adult thriller, the first part of a trilogy about a secret war that’s been waged for centuries, follows a young assassin who falls in love with a woman who calls into question the world as he knows it. As he desperately fights to uncover the elusive truth behind the conflict, he begins to wonder which side he’s really on — good or evil. CBS Films have bought the rights to Trevor Shane’s debut novel, and already have Battlestar Galactica‘s, Mark Verheiden on board to write the screenplay as well as producer Akiva Goldsman through his Weed Road banner.
Elusion: A few months ago Deadline let us know that Silver Reel and FlynnPictureCo have preemptively closed a deal for screen rights to Elusion, an upcoming young-adult novel written by Claudia Gabel and Cheryl Klam that is to be the first in a two-book series. Elusion is a contemporary sci-fi thriller about two love-struck teenagers who discover that the wildly popular game created by their wunderkind best friend, which uses deep hypnosis to transport users to a virtual alternate world, is actually much more sinister than it appears. It visits territory covered in Inception and Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind. The first book is set to come out March 2014 and the second sometime in 2015.
