Who’s familiar with the reclusive sc-fi author John Twelve Hawks? You even heard of the dude?
Well, some news out of THR has it that Fox just snagged the rights to Hawks’ best-selling series of books known as THE FOURTH REALM Trilogy, assigning WATCHMEN co-scribe Alex Tse to adapt. Not bad!
Produced by Gil Netter (THE BLIND SIDE) and Andrew Tennenbaum (THE BOURNE IDENTITY), the first book up for adaptation is entitled THE TRAVELER (published in ’06), which is set in a U.S. society run by a secret organization seeking to control the population via constant observation. Seeking to rebel against these constraints are an almost extinct group of people called Travelers, who can project their spirit into other dimensions, and their protectors, called Harlequins.
Drawing critical comparisons to such venerated sci-fi works as THE MATRIX and STAR WARS, THE FOURTH REALM series calls to attention the notion of privacy, public surveillance, free will, secret societies and the universal fight between good and evil. Comparisons to Dan Brown (“The Da Vinci Code”) have also been evoked.
Tse, who has toiled in the sci-fi fantasy genre with such efforts as NINJA SCROLL and THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, also has BATTLING BOY, GANGLAND & FRANKIE MACHINE in the works.
Joel Regal will exec-produce the adaptation.
WATCHMEN hottie Malin Akerman!