By Russ Fischer/June 24, 2010 2:01 pm EST
The LA Times reports only that Davis has bought the option — I’m honestly shocked that this option wasn’t already tightly clutched by someone else. I don’t know if a previous option holder just fell away, or if everyone else had assumed the rights were held and didn’t actually check on it. Regardless, Davis now has a window to produce a film based on Bradbury’s collection of short stories that describes the colonization of Mars by humans, and the inevitable conflict between human and martian that follows.
(Could the development accelerate or cease depending upon the success or lack thereof of Disney’s John Carter of Mars? You bet.)
The trade’s angle on this buy is that Avatar is the driving force behind this development, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see massive influence from Cameron’s film. We’ve asked for sci-fi to return to studios, and now we’ve got it…(be careful what you wish for.)
