After he got roundly pilloried for his work on X-Men Origins: Wolverine, we haven’t heard too much from Gavin Hood, who’s previously won an Oscar for Tsotsi. However if 24 Frames is correct, then he has big plans for the future.
They report that Hood is working on an adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s seminal sci-fi work, Ender’s Game, a property that’s interested a lot of people in the world of film before, but due to its epic nature, has never actually been turned into a movie.
It was announced last year that Card himself had wrote a screenplay based on his novel for Odd Lot Entertainment, and now it appears Hood has come onboard to direct (Card has written several screenplays based on Ender’s Game over the years for various companies, most recently for Warner Bros in 2003, when Wolfgang Petersen was interested in helming – but obviously that version never materialised). The multi-award winning 1985 novel tells of a world in which humans face a serious threat from an alien race known as the Formics and begin training elite military units in response. Against this backdrop comes Andrew Wiggin, also known as Ender, a child who becomes a top-flight solider and helps to save Earth (by fighting simulations that turn out to be real).
However, it should be noted that the young age of the characters and the complexity of the story has always meant that film versions of Ender’s Game have faltered before they got the greenlight, so just because there’s now a script and director, doesn’t mean it won’t all collapse again before going into production.