Did you spot this last week?? UK Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman has announced plans to host the UK’s first Young Adult (YA) Literature Convention in 2014.
As part of the London Film and Comic Con in July 2014 - the convention will bring YA publishers together to host author events with talks, workshops, signings, book shops and publisher stands to promote new and upcoming titles.
Book your flights now. Go on.
Remember waaaaay back in July I got excited about SYLO and DJ McHale being back? Turns out I wasn’t the only one.
With Thor Freudenthal (Diary of Wimpy Kid) named as director with writer Marc Guggenheim (Percy Jackson, Arrow and a heap of DC and Marvel comic series).
Now. GO READ THE BOOK!
Some bad news for fans of James Dashner’s The Maze Runner …
The planned feature adaptation won’t hit until September next (instead of February as planned) Wes Ball (Maze Runner director) hit twitter on Friday to announce it:
Good news and bad news y’all. Bad news, you have to wait a bit longer. Good news, the movie and marketing can be the best it can be now. These things aren’t my choice, but I 100% agree with fox’s decision. Just imagine the cool stuff we can do with a little extra time.
The notoriously cranky Mark Millar (Kickass, Wanted) is… er, happy.
Check out what deadline.com have after he read the latest adaptation of his Nemesis series (have you read Nemesis yet?!):
How can I put this?
Nemesis is one of the most relentless and powerful screenplays I’ve ever read. I was actually SHELL-SHOCKED after reading it, thinking about it for hours afterwards and discussing it with the family. As a movie, the Carnahans have crafted something we’ve never actually seen before and I feel like someone in Julia Phillips’ office must have felt when Schrader’s TAXI DRIVER script first landed on their desk. This is going to be one of the best movies of the decade. The fact that it’s a SUPERHERO movie is incredibly exciting to me. This is the next step for where a comic-book adaptation can go and, simply as a viewer, I’m now counting down the days until I can sit in a screening room and see the first cut.
This is going to be MASSIVE.
And I’m not being hyperbolic here. Joe and Matthew Carnahan are two of the most respected people in the business and Joe’s most recent movie, The Grey, ranks as my favourite in a year that had a lot of my favourite movies. He upped his game again with the Death Wish screenplay, which was one of the most compelling scripts I’ve ever read, but he’s blown his other work out of the water with Nemesis. I had no idea where he was going with this (I wrote the book back in 2010, co-created with the brilliant artist Steve McNiven), but Joe had been tight-lipped on what he had planned and wanted me to experience the entire package for maximum impact when I sat myself down with a nice bottle of whisky and soaked this up over a two hour period.
There’s nothing else I can really say. I’ve been blessed with the people adapting these Millarworld books so far, some of the best writers and directors currently working in film, but NOTHING prepared me for this. This is huge, operatic, tragic, monumental. This is about America right now and the world the audience is walking back into the second they leave the cinema. Nemesis is about America’s worst nightmare in the form of a costumed billionaire attacking a city and doing everything he can to tear it down. The high concept, it’s been said, is if Batman was The Joker and that’s quite a fun way of looking at it. The cop who goes up against him, the Blake Morrow character in the book, is going to be a movie icon after this picture. I don’t know who’s going to be playing him at this stage, but I know that after reading the script everyone is going to WANT to.
It seemed odd to me in the economic downturn that we’d all be rooting for a costumed billionaire out there fighting poor people in Gotham City every night. That’s what was in the back of my mind when I first sat down to write the book, this notion that richest guys on the planet could actually be the most terrifying. But what Joe and Matthew have done with this is practically alchemical. I joked to Joe on the phone last night that he’s basically a brilliant plastic surgeon who has taken a decent-looking individual and turned them into a sex-bomb.
This is my new favourite movie and it’s still a year or two away from anyone even seeing it. It’s going to be the biggest and smartest action movie we’ve all seen in a very, very long time.Get excited.
You heard the man. GET EXCITED!
David Levithan and Sarah J Maas hit Dublin yesterday (and today, stalk the streets!) for an event at Easons.
There were tears, cheers, hugs and creepy voices - and there were wise words and funny words. And there was a video, oh yes, a video.
Were you there?
EW caught David Heyman (producer from the original HP series) to talk about the new scripts…
Jo is at work. She’s not doing it for any other reason other than she loves the world and she had a story that she wanted to tell. It’s incredibly exciting. She doesn’t have to go back to this world, but something pulled her back. This is not Harry Potter. This is not Harry, Ron, and Hermione. This is a separate story within a universe related to the Potter universe. The fact that she’s going to this world means there are stories to tell. When I was doing the Harry Potters, what was clear to me is that Jo’s knowledge of this world is infinite. What you read in the books was just the surface of her knowledge. She had notebook upon notebook of stuff. I would call her and say, ‘What’s the sixth use of dragon’s blood?’ and she’d have it at her fingertips. In the fifth film, I think it was, we had the Black family tree, I called her, and literally 20 minutes later I receive this family tree, via fax in those days, with a hundred names and about six generations with birthdays, death dates, marriages, all figured out. She knew it.