Matched is a 2010 young adult novel by Ally Condie, featuring a dystopian society where all media and art is regulated, the state determines the day you will die, and your perfect mate is chosen by algorithm when you turn seventeen. It stars Cassia Reyes, two guys her age, and the slow realization that things are not as they seem and that everyone is in grave danger.
There will come a day when I’m so tired of female-led, love-triangle-having, darkly-themed YA fantasy and science fiction that it makes me care less about how Hollywood accepting them as a money-making trend means that we get to see more women as leads in genre films. But it is not this day.
David Slade, of Twilight: Eclipse, 30 Days of Night and Hard Candy, has been tapped by Disney to helm the adaptation of the first book in the Matched trilogy. The script is already written, thanks to Michelle and Kieran Mulroney, whose Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows opened last year.
In Matched, Cassia Reyes’ algorithm pairs her with both of her close male friends before correct itself to exclude the one who is related to a criminal. A government official tells her it was simply a mistake, but it becomes the first crack in the illusion in which Cassia, her family, and her friends live. The second book in the series, Crossed, concerns her adventure trying to track down one of those friends in the wastes he was banished to, and the third Reached, has yet to be published.
I haven’t read the books, and to be honest, the details of the setting, as I’ve seen in summary, seem too familiar to really grab my attention. But as I said above: I’m all in favor of women getting movies made out of the stories they’ve written about women.
(via The Hollywood Reporter.)
