20th Century Fox has optioned the movie rights of Brandon Sanderson‘s Steelheart, along with book two, titled Firefight. Steelheart and Firefight are in the Young Adult category for novels and are the first two books of the Reckoners Trilogy.
According to Deadline, this was a sought after book commodity in Hollywood, and rightly so, as the books are excellent reads and could work really well visually on screen. And being that adapting Young Adults novels is still something of a “thing” at the moment (something I hope would only increase and improve as a viable and respectable source of material for film and TV), this could happen sooner rather than later.
In Reckoners, a burst in the sky gave ordinary people extraordinary powers. The awed public started calling them Epics, but with incredible gifts came the desire to rule. In what was once Chicago, an astonishingly powerful Epic named Steelheart installed himself as emperor. Nobody fights back but the Reckoners, a shadowy group of ordinary humans who spend their lives studying Epics, finding their weaknesses, and then assassinating them. The book centers on David, who wants in to the group because Steelheart killed his father, and he alone knows the Epics’ true weakness.
The movies are to be produced under Shawn Levy‘s Fox-based 21 Laps company. No word yet on whether Levy, director and producer of the Night at the Museum films, plans on directing the project, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if he did.
As a fan of the books, I’m really excited for this to actually happen, but I’m also aware of the lengths it takes for a book to actually be adapted into film. Thus at this early stage of the game, I could only hope it goes to the next stage. Brandon Sanderson is more known for his adult fantasy books at the moment, as he’s been writing them for many years, and even has taken over writing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series after Jordan’s death.
Steelheart was published in September 2013, and Firefight was just released earlier this month. Calamity, the third book of the trilogy, has no release date at the moment, but since Sanderson has the tendency to write multiple books at the same time, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t get published until 2017.
(source)