THE WARDED MAN is being adapted for the Big-Screen by Paul W.S Anderson

THR reports that director and writer Paul W. S. Anderson and longtime producing partner Jeremy Bolt, the team behind the Resident Evil franchise and the upcoming sci-fi thriller Pandorum, have picked up the film rights to Peter V. Brett's best-selling fantasy novel The Warded Man.

The book is set in an undetermined future where mankind is beset by nightly attacks from demonkind and has been thrown back into a feudal state. Three young people emerge with the potential power to turn the tide, including the title character, a man who has wards (spells) tattooed on his body.

Bolt will produce and Anderson will helm the film adaptation. Anderson said of acquiring the rights to the book:

It was an occasion where it paid to be British. It launched in the U.K. six months earlier than in the U.S., and we got wind of it when it was in galley form before the U.K. release. We think it has the potential to be a new 'Lord of the Rings'-style epic, and the book has all this great imagery.

If you can get your hands on something that has the epic scope of LOTR, you jump on it! Bolt further explained:

We put our own money to buy it. We were reading all these great reviews, and we thought someone was going to buy it pretty fast.

The imagery looks amazing. Hopefully Anderson and Bolt can get a budget worthy of the

Brett was an ad man, who while on his two-hour commute to Manhattan, wrote the first book on his Blackberry. Yes, he wrote a NOVEL on his tiny gadget phone. What a way to kill some time! That's the first I've heard of someone doing that.

Warded Man is the first of a planned trilogy titled The Demon Cycle. The book launched last year in Australia before hitting Europe, where it became an instant best-seller. Brett is revising the second novel, The Desert Spear, which will be released worldwide in April.