Sci-Fi Film and Television Developments

The Passage

6/20/11 - Jason Keller has been hired to pen the adaptation of Justin Cronin's epic 2009 novel The Passage for Fox 2000, according to The Hollywood Reporter.  Matt Reeves will direct.  Cronin's Passage, which is the first of a planned trilogy, is set a hundred years in the future after a government experiment to lengthen the human life span ends up turning people into vampires. Fox 2000 picked up rights to the proposed trilogy of books in 2007.  John Logan wrote the original draft of the script.

4/18/11 - Matt Reeves, the director behind Let Me In, has come aboard to develop and direct The Passage, Fox 2000’s adaptation of the novel by Justin Cronin, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Ridley Scott is producing.  Published in 2009, the novel is set a hundred years in the future, where a government experiment to lengthen the human life span goes awry, unleashing a virus that physically and psychologically transforms people into vampires.  John Logan wrote the script when Scott was considering the project as a directing vehicle.

9/16/09 - Writer John Logan has been set by Fox 2000 to adapt The Passage, the Jordan Ainsley vampire novel being developed for Ridley Scott to potentially direct, Variety reported.  Fox 2000 acquired the book two years ago, paying seven figures for the three-book series right after its publishing rights sold to Ballantine for $3.75 million.  Ainsley—pseudonym for PEN Hemingway Award-winning author Justin Cronin—sold the book based on the first 400 pages and an outline, but the film adaptation awaited his completion of the book, which is nearly 1,200 pages.  In the novel, terminally ill patients become healthy after they are bitten by bats in South America, and the government conducts secret tests on human subjects to see if the virus can cure illness. The result is an apocalyptic unleashing of bloodthirsty vampire test subjects that include death row inmates.

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