Regardless of what you think of the Twilight Saga, it has been a huge success for Summit Entertainment. The resurgence of monsters in film (zombies, vampires, werewolves) has H’wood scrambling to grab ahold of anything to make a buck. Universal Pictures thinks it is time to revisit Anne Rice’s vampire stories.
The Universal Pictures picked up the rights to Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and have tapped Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (Transformers, Star Trek, Spider-Man) to produce. That is rather interesting, because the Kurtzman/Orci breakup was big news some months ago.
The Vampire Chronicles is a series of novels by Anne Rice that revolves around the fictional character Lestat de Lioncourt, a French nobleman turned into a vampire in the 18th century.
Most of the books are written predominately in first-person perspective with only a few being in third-person. Interview with the Vampire was made into a 1994 film starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater and Kirsten Dunst. Portions of The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of The Damned both were used for the 2002 film Queen of the Damned, starring Stuart Townsend and Aaliyah.
As of November 2008, The Vampire Chronicles had sold 80 million copies worldwide.
According to Variety, the deal includes screenplay adaptations of Tale of the Body Thief, and perhaps reboots of Interview with a Vampire, and Queen of the Damned.
2 Comments
I’m a little torn here. I still really like “Queen of the Damned”, but I wouldn’t mind seeing some of the concepts from the other books adapted to the big screen (I’ve always wanted to see “Memnoch The Devil” made into a movie).
“Good news everyone!”
The vampire chonicles are great vampire stories and I would love to see some A-movies with Lestat.