Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern Gears Up For A Film Adaptation Again

The last time somebody tried to get Dragonriders of Pern (a series of novels written by Anne McCaffrey that won her the first Hugo and Nebula awards ever given to a woman) up on a screen of some kind, it was as a television show for the WB, and the production made it all the way through casting, had a crew, a special effects team, and was about to start shooting when Warner Bros. ordered a script rewrite to turn the thing into a somewhat more comedy focused action series contrary to the wishes of the producer, and the whole thing fell apart.

Well, the stars have aligned, the Red Star has returned to rain Thread down upon the planet of Pern, and David Hayter has been tapped to write the screenplay for a Dragonriders movie.

According to Deadline, “Steve Hoban‘s Copperheart Entertainment has teamed with Hayter and Benedict Carver‘s Dark Hero Studios and Angry Films partners Don Murphy and Susan Montford on the project.” Hayter was responsible for the scripts to Watchmen, The Scorpion King, and the first two X-Men movies (no, no there wasn’t a third one, forget about that). The idea is to put the movie into production in 2012.

So maybe I’ll actually have to find and read more than one of the Pern books. I read one years ago when I was but a snip of a gel wandering around the Science Fiction/Fantasy section of the library pulling down enormous ratty hardcover editions of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and the Mallorean, but was never able to figure out which one came next.

(via Deadline.)