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Officially Official

Ender’s Game Will Become a Live-Action Film

by Jamie Frevele | 12:29 pm, April 29th

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Summit Entertainment has scored the rights to Orson Scott Card‘s Ender’s Game, which will be adapted by Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) into a live-action film. Hood will be writing the screenplay and directing, and Card will be among the producers. Now that Summit’s Twilight franchise is ending, will this be their next successful youth-driven series? And will this provide some competition against Lionsgate‘s adaptation of The Hunger Games?

Ender’s Game, which is about gifted children recruited by the government to fight back against an alien invasion and not in a fun happy Power Rangers way but a squicky, uncomfortable Neon Genesis Evangelion way, features characters younger than those in Twilight and The Hunger Games. Kind of, age-wise, where the Harry Potter series began. There is considerable psychological torture and moments of incredible violence. So, the likelyhood of the characters getting aged up? It’s Hollywood, so there’s always that chance, but perhaps not with Card in the producer’s circle.

This isn’t the first time a movie has been discussed for Ender’s Game. The rights were originally bought by Warner Bros. in 2002, but that option lapsed when Card conflicted with director Wolfgang Petersen. Since then, producer Gigi Pritzker (Odd Lot) stepped in and hired Hood.

Hood is currently preparing a visual presentation for the Cannes Film Festival, where the film will be shopped around for distribution.

(Top pic courtesy of Penny Arcade, story via Deadline)

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  • DFV

    What is squicky?

  • http://twitter.com/urchinmoppet better known as Rem

    I’m excited by the idea (I’ve wanted an Enders Game movie for years now) but at the same time it’s quite likely this is going to go south. With all the violence and mindfu*kery, I can’t imagine it could be anything but a rated R movie, and if they try to go for a PG13 rating, they’ll have to strip the story of everything that made it worth reading. :(

  • Anonymous

    I’m excited, but yeah, it could all go wrong (but with Card attached…? If he has kicked out Petersen he doesn’t seem to be afraid of big names, if it protects his baby. And he seems to have the power to do that).

    And Kick Ass has shown that you can have very young actors/characters that do stuff way above their age… bad stuff. Lets hope Enders Game will be at least as daring.

  • http://twitter.com/WanderinDreamr hbm

    From tvtropes: “Squick: Possibly a contraction of ‘squeamish’ and ‘Ick!’ A negative emotional response, more specifically a disturbed or disgusted one. As in: ‘The relationship between Cordelia and Connor in Angel Season Four gave me a case of the squicks.’ “

  • http://twitter.com/thegeekery The Geekery

    That would be cool, but I remember reading in an interview with Card, that he wanted Ender to be young (I believe he is around 6 years old in the book or so), and so casting anything older would hamper the intensity of the story and character, but it could be really disturbing to see a 6 year old break a kid’s arm and then kill another kid.

  • Snowysolstice
  • llbbl

    awesome

  • mendax

    Ender ages from 6 to about 11 throughout the book

  • http://intellectandromance.tumblr.com Jalen

    Ender’s Game is simply not a story meant for Hollywood. They’ll strip it so far down and change the whole purpose of it so that it’s practically unrecognizable.

  • Stiny

    I’m willing to give these guys a chance. I mean, yes, it’s going to be nigh to impossible to hire a 6-year-old Ender to play the part that has the same maturity level, and I doubt it will measure up to the book (as most film adaptations of books usually don’t), but it has the potential to at least gain some fans and perk interest in reading the book. The hard part would be to get into Ender’s thought processes without it looking stupid.

    And yes, I think the movie could be just as powerful without blood. This would take it down from R, and even PG-13, if the language was taken out as well. Blood is not needed to show the level of violence. All that is needed is the initial contact of the blow and the sound of something breaking or yelling, and that will get the message across clearly enough.