Summit Entertainment, which is looking to replace the hugely successful Twilight franchise, has acquired U.S. rights to a live-action adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction novel Ender’s Game. Gavin Hood (Totsi, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) is set to direct the Ender’s Game feature from his script. Summit sees the property as a chance to create another youth-driven series with protagonists who are younger than those in the recently optioned YA series The Hunger Games. Card’s Ender’s Game saga consists of 11 novels and 10 short stories so there is plenty of material for a movie franchise.

 

Based on a 1977 short story, Card’s 1985 novel is set on an Earth that is in the midst of an alien invasion. A desperate government recruits gifted youngsters and trains them to fight back using a highly competitive game to determine the best fighters and strategists. As Deadline points out, Warner Bros. optioned the property in 2002 and tried for years to make it with director Wolfgang Petersen before letting the option lapse.

 

Marvel began publishing a comic book series based on Ender’s Game in 2008, and has so far published 34 issues. The comic book series has both adapted the Card novels and presented new material not found in the books. Marvel’s Ender’s Game comics have been collected into a series of 5 graphic novels.