ALTERED CARBON film rights re-optioned

This is slightly older news (from February) but something that had managed to slip past my radar. Mythology Entertainment, a newly-formed production company, has secured the movie rights to Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan's debut novel and the first featuring his body-hopping protagonist Takeshi Kovacs. The deal also includes the book's two sequels, Woken Furies and Broken Angels, though presumably not his 'fantasy' trilogy which is set in the distant future of the same setting.

The book was originally optioned by Matrix producer Joel Silver shortly after the novel was published, allowing Morgan to become a full-time writer after completing only just one book. This attempt to make a film came to nothing. A second attempt during the 2008 Writer's Guild of America Strike (when the studios were looking at using completed-but-unmade scripts to put into production to get around the lack of new scripts being written) also came to nothing.

Laeta Kalogridis, the executive producer of Avatar and scriptwriter of Shutter Island, will co-pen the script along with David Goodman. Interesting to see if this gets made or languishes in development hell for several years. I am particularly interested to see how they handle the problem of the film requiring several actors to play the hero (as Kovacs is 're-sleeved' several times in different bodies).