Paramount to Bring Ray Bradbury's THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES to the Big Screen
Paramount Pictures going to take Ray Bradbury's classic sci-fi short story collection The Martian Chronicles, and they are adapting it into a feature film. Producer John Davis optioned the rights to the stories back in June of last year, and he's still attached to it.
I'm not that impressed with what Davis has worked on over the years, films such as Alien Vs. Predator, I, Robot, Mamaduke, Norbit, Day Day Camp, First Daughter and a bunch of other films that I don't really care for. Hopefully he puts together a talented team of people to make this film adaptation worth watching. Back in the 80's the book was turned into a TV miniseries that starred Rock Hudson and Bernadette Peters.
Spielberg tried to get a film adaptation made over at Universal Pictures back in 1997, but obviously it never happened, which is a shame. This has the potential to be an awesome sci-fi film. Like all literary classics I hope that it gets done right.
Here's a little more detailed description of the book.
The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction short story collection by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists. The book lies somewhere between a short story collection and an episodic novel, containing stories Bradbury originally published in the late 1940s in science fiction magazines. For publication, the stories were loosely woven together with a series of short, interstitial vignettes.