Hollywood producers Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne were the founders of New Line Pictures (which produced, among others, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Last Mimzy). They left the company earlier this year when it was absorbed into Warner Brothers. Now they’ve formed a new production company, Unique Features (which has a three-year deal with Warner Brothers, giving the latter a first look at all their proposed productions), and weeks after announcing the new company, have announced that their first project will be an adaptation of Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation series. The science fiction classic (which won a special “all-time best series” Hugo award in 1965, beating out The Lord of the Rings), focuses on the development of “psychohistory,” a science by which inventor Hari Seldon can predict the future for large numbers of people.
The Hollywood Reporter, which reports on the deal, emphasizes the political aspects of the work (empire building and the like), but notes that Asimov stories have been notoriously hard to adapt to the big screen, due to their large casts of characters, and their focus more on thoughts, ideas, and dialogue, to the near-exclusion of cinematic action.
Shaye and Lynne are currently planning to adapt only the first book. They’ll move on to the others if the first proves successful. Shaye called the trilogy “one of the things I’ve had close to my heart” since reading them when he was young. He said the project’s goal is to find and create an audience for the work. “Our idea is to renew the worldwide audience’s appetite for the story.” He did caution Asimov’s already extant fans that “this is not a script you can knock out in six months,” noting that the complexity of the story will cause Unique to move forward carefully on the project. Shaye did praise the “ambition” of Foundation, saying “this epitomizes the movies we want to make, not the movies that ought to be made to fill a slate or movies that repeat an old formula.”
Fox Studios had previously been working on a Foundation adaptation, but as one condensed script. Vince Gerardis (who produced I, Robot, the Will Smith knock-off of Asimov’s robot stories) had been attached as producer, with Jeff Vintar writing the script.
Loosely based on Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first three books were written as a series of connected novellas which appeared in John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction between 1942 and 1950. They later appeared as Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). In the 1980s, Asimov wrote several sequels and prequels to the original stories, and since his death (in 1992), several other big name authors have continued to write in the universe.