While Sam Raimi has been keeping busy as a producer, on the directing front, he hasn’t been behind the camera of any feature film since 2013’s “Oz The Great And Powerful.” And while he’s lined up no shortage of projects including a remake of “A Prophet,” “World War 3,” the tornado heist flick “Stormfall,” and a Bermuda triangle project, nothing has really stuck (he even turned down “The Flash: Flashpoint“). Now, he’s putting another project on the pile, which seems to be right in his fantasy wheelhouse.
Raimi has signed up to director a feature adaptation of Pat Rothfuss‘ “The Kingkiller Chronicle” books, and the project has Lin-Manuel Miranda on the producing side along with the author, to help bring this vision to life. I’m not even going to pretend I know anything about this series, which is about a musician who becomes a wizard. Or something. Here’s the synopsis for the first book in the series:
Told in Kvothe’s own voice, this is the tale of the magically gifted young man who grows to be the most notorious wizard his world has ever seen.
The intimate narrative of his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, his years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-ridden city, his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a legendary school of magic, and his life as a fugitive after the murder of a king form a gripping coming-of-age story unrivaled in recent literature.
While this is brewing, Showtime is brewing their own prequel series that will take place before the events of the books, so clearly Hollywood is banking on this being the next “Game Of Thrones” sized thing. Lindsey Beer (“Transformers: The Last Knight“) was selected to write the script over a year ago, but no word yet if she’s still involved. And for all we know, this could end up in the dusty pile of various things Raimi has signed up for, but never got off the ground. [THR]