What’s special about the news that Hollywood has bought the rights to yet another YA title? As Entertainment Weekly puts it, “although every studio would like to grab a fresh YA book series in the hope that it can be turned into the next Harry Potter-style film franchise, not every film has the actual producer of the Potter movies overseeing it.”

The debut YA novel, Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo (Macmillan BYR) came out in June and hit the NYT Chapter Book Best Seller list for one week, at #8. The first in a planned series, it will be produced for Dreamworks by David Heyman, who also produced Harry Potter.

A few other YA franchises are already in the works. Next year alone brings Beautiful Creatures (Feb 13), Mortal Instruments (Aug. 23), The Seventh Son (Oct 18; based on Joseph Delaney’s the Last Apprentice series) as well as the second Hunger Games movie, Catching Fire (Nov. 22). 

In addition, Divergent was just given a release date of 3/21/14. It is based on the first in the series by Veronica Roth, whose blurb,”unlike anything I’ve ever read” appears on the cover of Shadow and Bone. Lionsgate is still touting a series based on Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking trilogy, and the screenplay for the film of Marie Lu’s Legend was completed this summer. In July, Paramount acquired the rights to Libby Bray’s forthcoming first book in a series, The Diviners.

To throw a bit of title confusion into the mix, Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor was acquired by Universal in December. The second title in the planned book trilogy, Days of Blood and Starlight, is coming in Nov.

That’s just the series; we’ll also be seeing  several films based on YA standalones.

It’s a good time to remember that there have been some failed YA film franchises.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Books & Movies, Childrens and YA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.