ENDER'S GAME - Lead Role Offered to HUGO's Asa Butterfield

We've got some pretty big news on the Ender's Game movie front. The 14-year-old star of Martin Scorsese's Hugo Asa Butterfield has been offered the lead role of Ender in the Gavin Hood (Wolverine) directed adaptation of the classic Orson Scott Card sci-fi novel.

This is a movie a ton of us fanboys have been waiting to see happen for years! It's crazy that it will actually see the light of day. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of faith in the films director. As for Butterfield being offered the role, it looks like he might be a good fit. He a solid actor that has been in other films such as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Son of Rambow.

I don't see why this wouldn't take the role! It's the chance of a lifetime, and could end up being the best role of his career. What are your thought's on Butterfield taking on this part? Do you think he is a good fit for Ender?

The author of the book and screenwriter Orson Scott Card recent reached out to us and gave us some details and insight on what we have to look forward to from the movie. Here's what he had to say...

The problem with the book, as a movie, is that all the important information about ender's motives comes from internal monologue - his thoughts.  Since voiceovers are loathsome, Ender's actions would remain unexplained, and he would appear to be little more than a violent kid.

Also, the book would make a movie that was at least four hours long.  Much has to be cut - including all of Peter's and Valentine's online exploits, the mind game, and much of the incidental material before Ender gets into Bonzo's army.

In short, much will be omitted.  But I remain confident that as long as the character of Ender himself, with his relationships with other kids, is in the movie, it will still be Ender's Game to my own satisfaction and the satisfaction of the fans.

...Whoever plays Ender will almost certainly be an actor you haven't seen before, and with any luck, a child who has not gone through the soul-numbing process of being cute on camera.  In other words, I hope it is a child who never had an agent, but who is very, very intelligent and therefore can take direction.

Here is my own source of greatest confidence:  The movie will not erase a single word of the book!  That's how I endure knowing that Peter Jackson committed the repulsive crime of removing the Scouring of the Shire from the Lord of the Rings movie, which is akin to removing the last chapter from EG.  THAT, at least, I know will not happen in the EG movie - all the producers understand that the point of the story is finding out that the very thing that allowed Ender to defeat the formics (loving his enemy in order to defeat them) makes his discovery all the more galling to him.

Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are producing through their K/O Paper Products banner, and the film is set to be released on March 15, 2013.

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