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Fox Snags Big Screen Rights to Young Adult Series 'Incarceron'

by Ethan Anderton
February 28, 2010

With all the wild success of the Harry Potter franchise and moderately well-received Chronicles of Narnia adaptations, there have been more than a few attempted copycat adaptations of numerous fantasy novels trying to capture the same magic and appeal to youth. Frankly I'm sick of it, so, naturally there's yet another youth-based fantasy adaptation on the way as Variety reports Fox has won a bidding war for the rights to to Incarceron, the first book in a new series of the same name which tells the story of a young boy who lives in a prison that is a complete society in a world stuck in the 17th century and run by computers. Read on!

With the angle of a dystopian fantasy rather than a magical one, the story takes flight when the young boy comes into contact with the prison warden's daughter, who kind of lives in a jail of her own, and they find a key that can change everything. Sounds like a darker version of City of Ember. If all goes well, we'll also get to see an adaptation of the next book in the series, Sapphique, which won't be out until next January (after all, Incarceron was only published three weeks ago). But of course the first film still needs screenwriters, so this project is just getting warmed up. Sounds like it could be one for the whole family to look forward to.

Explore tags: Movie News, Opinions

Lincoln

"Sounds like a darker version of City of Ember" I kinda liked City Of Ember, I'll probably check this out when it's on dvd.
http://equustel.livejournal.com equustel

It should not be assumed all YA fiction is trying to go for the Harry Potter effect. Dystopian sci-fi is a huge hit with the YA crowd right now - see "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins - and should not be counted out by adult sci-fi fans, as some of the ideas (and especially the characters) present in these tales shame the more complex stuff being written for the adult sci-fi/fantasy shelves.
http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/2408/blackbabyjesus.gif Crapola

Sounds a bit steampunk, I'll keep an eye oot for more.
Squiggly_P

Fox will do to this what it did to Eragon and Percy Jackson (I'm making assumptions about Percy Jackson, since I've not seen it and don't plan to see it any time soon. Let me know if I'm off base. I doubt I am, tho...) FOX doesn't really give a fuck if the book is good. They can market the book with the fact that it's going to be a major motion picture and people will think "oh, this must be good!", and then they'll market the film as "Based on the hit book series!". The series will be a hit because they're making a movie, and the movie will be a hit because the book is popular (because of the movie). It's like a cyclic marketing scheme that pretty much guarantees that both the book and the film will do well. Better than they ever would have had they not marketed them that way. The script they end up with will bear a passing resemblance to the book, in that it will have the same characters and they'll have the same basic story. The movie, however, will take anything remotely similar to an 'action' sequence and pad it out to be a major spectacle, no matter how trivial it may have been in the book, and to accommodate the enhanced action sequences, they'll gleefully cut out anything resembling character development or subplot/subtext. You already know the movie is going to be shit because the target audience is one of the dumbest, most easily amused target audiences on the planet: teens.