Star Trek writers will tell A People’s History Of The Vampire Uprising

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

At one point, the third film in the rebooted STAR TREK franchise was going to be directed by Roberto Orci from a screenplay he was writing with JD Payne and Patrick McKay. Orci ended up being replaced by Justin Lin and the screenplay was scrapped, with Simon Pegg and Doug Jung taking over to write what became STAR TREK BEYOND. That wasn't the end of Payne and McKay's association with STAR TREK, though. Soon after the release of BEYOND, it was announced that Payne and McKay would be writing the fourth film in the new timeline.

While fans wait to hear more news on the next STAR TREK film, which is supposed to feature Chris Pine's James T. Kirk crossing paths with his late father George (Chris Hemsworth) on some sort of time travel adventure, Payne and McKay have set up another writing project: the duo will be scripting an adaptation of the Raymond Villareal novel A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE VAMPIRE UPRISING, which Little Brown's Mulholland Books won't even be publishing until next summer.

Described as "WORLD WAR Z with vampires", A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE VAMPIRE UPRISING is 

an “oral history” of the appearance, assimilation, and ultimately epic and violent confrontation of vampires with the human race. It chronicles the rise of the vampires, who call themselves “The Gloaming,” from multiple points of view: the CDC investigator who discovers a mysterious virus; the FBI agent who forms the first Gloaming Crimes Unit; a civil rights attorney’s analysis of the Gloaming Equal Rights Act; an obsessive Vatican librarian; and even TMZ.

If you don't like the "WORLD WAR Z with vampires" description, there's another one that compares the idea to TRAFFIC: 

(A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE VAMPIRE UPRISING) subverts the vampire mythology by telling the story through various points of view in a grounded political ensemble in the vein of TRAFFIC. 

The adaptation is being produced by Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen of 21 Laps for 20th Century Fox. Sony, Universal, and Lionsgate had also been interested in the VAMPIRE UPRISING film rights, but Fox beat them to it.

The WORLD WAR Z film didn't have much to do with the Max Brooks novel it was based on. Maybe this film will be more true to its source material.