Hot on the heels of this morning’s item about the Diamond Age miniseries comes news of two more big fantasy/sci-fi projects in development. First, Variety reports that HBO has acquired the rights to George R.R. Martin‘s epic fantasy, “A Song of Fire and Ice.” So far, only four of the seven books in the series have been published, and each of them runs about 1,000 pages, so the cable network is basically aiming for a seven-season series, executive produced by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who respectively wrote screenplays for Troy and Halo. As reporter Michael Fleming notes, there’s “a decidedly adult bent” to Martin’s novels, “with sex and violence comparable to series like Rome and Deadwood.” Not to mention—and here’s where I suspect part of the appeal lies from a budgetary standpoint—very little in the way of supernatural magic, apart from some young dragons.
Meanwhile, the Hollywood Reporter has the story on Disney’s negotiation for Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ “John Carter of Mars” novels. The studio actually owned the rights in the ’90s, with plans to compress the series into a cartoon, but somewhere down the line it became a live-action feature, and when the property was at Paramount, the directors attached included Robert Rodriguez and Jon Favreau. Now, although the Burroughs estate is saying Disney is looking to acquire the series as a “tentpole franchise” similar to Pirates of the Caribbean, the Reporter cites a source within the studio as saying that the Pixar division wants to make cartoons. (If you’re curious as to what’s got them all excited, Penguin Classics has just reissued the first book in the series, A Princess of Mars, first published in 1912.)