No, this is not like last year’s April Fools joke. This is for real. I am not messing with you. 🙂
I am pleased to finally be able to annouce that Monster Hunter International has been optioned by Entertainment One for the possible production of a TV show.
For everything: http://www.entertainmentonegroup.com/ For TV: http://www.eonetv.com/ You may recognize them from such awesome things as the Walking Dead on AMC, Red with Bruce Willis, and even… sigh… Twilight. (hey, might not be my thing, but you can’t fault her for sleeping on gigantic piles of money, but it illustrates that these folks are Big Time)
What does this mean? This does not mean that a TV show is actually being made yet or anything like that. It just means that Entertainment One has bought the option to produce MHI. It is up to them now if they will proceed with a pilot, and which network would be interested in it.
This is just the sale of the rights, so don’t get too excited… Heck, okay, get excited. I am. Tell your friends and then come visit me while I’m on book tour so we can geek out together. This just means that there is now a very real and serious possibility that MHI could end up on TV.
Back in ye olde tymes before the writer’s strike, lots and lots of books got optioned by Hollywood. You would have literally a hundred books optioned for every one that actually went into production. For the novelists, that meant that we basically got paid money to just not sell the rights to someobdy else. Post-strike, now Hollywood is a lot more picky and only options a handful of novels. (I have no idea how their business works, I stick with writing books, not screenplays). So it is harder to get optioned than it used to be, but now your odds of it actually getting produced once optioned are better.
Right now is a great time for quality shows on cable, and because of the sucess of things like True Blood and the Walking Dead, other big channels are also looking for urban fantasy/horror properties. Monster Hunter International certainly fits the bill.
Luckily for me, Baen’s Hollywood agent is Vince Gerardis (currently the executive producer on HBO’s Game of Thrones) and he’s a complete badass who knows how to get the job done.
I’ve not been able to say anything about this for a long time. In ’09 there was some serious interest in MHI from a couple of movie studios. That didn’t pan out. (though I was shocked by who some of my fans are out there, including a couple of successful producers and one particularly awesome Oscar winning actor who I happen to be a huge fan of). Last year I started getting queries again from various interested parties, including a few that I had to look up on the IMDB, and when I’d seen what they’d done, it was rather mind blowing. (Oh, got a voice mail from another movie producer… Let’s check him on IMDB… Aaaand… he’s produced two Academy Award winners, better call Vince), that kind of thing.
It is a good that (according to a some chump blogger a couple of weeks back) I’m not a *real* bestseller, otherwise these things might have gone to my head!
I’ve known about this deal since SHOT Show, but haven’t been allowed to say anything online until today. I figured I might as well tell you guys as soon as I could. Maybe it will boost my Hard Magic sales…. Oooohh… Now Hard Magic would make an awesome movie starring Adam Baldwin as Sullivan and Chloe Moretz as Faye. (Dieselpunk, it’s the next Big Thing!) And Dead Six should be a ultra-realistic, hyper-violent American anime series produced by Titmouse with Lorenzo being voiced by Steve Blum and Valentine by Oliver Wyman… I’m just saying. Those would also be great projects. Have your people call my people.
Let’s do lunch.
