Variety reports that Columbia Pictures (a division of Sony Pictures) won an auction for the motion picture rights to Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation, and they expect Roland Emmerich to direct it. Emmerich and his partner Michael Wimer (both of Centropolis Entertainment) will produce the film. The deal, says Variety, was “for mid-six against low-seven figures.”
As we reported in July, Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne of Unique Features had been planning to develop the property for Warner Brothers. Variety says the surprise deal with Columbia and Emmerich “owes at least a bit to the animosity between Warner Brothers and Fox over Watchmen.”
Vince Gerardis of Created By is the agent for the Asimov estate, and he’ll be a producer of this film, which was originally developed by Fox. Gerardis is also producing the adaptation of Asimov’s The End of Eternity which we announced in November. Variety goes on to say “Fox would have had to be compensated for its development costs. That became a problem for Warner Brothers, and the studio allowed its option to lapse, expecting to quietly make a new deal with a clear chain of rights that would have left Fox and Gerardis on the outside.”
In addition to Gerardis, Creative Artists Agency and Dan Strong of Trident Media were involved in the deal-making.
Asimov’s most famous series, the original Foundation trilogy, was written first as a series of connected stories which appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in the 1940s (the stories were collected into novels Foundation [1951], Foundation and Empire [1952], and Second Foundation [1953]). The work was Asimov’s adaptation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and focused on the impending fall of a galactic empire. In the books, the development of the science of “psychohistory” predicted movements of masses of people over time, and expected to be able to shrink the expected dark ages following the fall from 30,000 years to a scant 1,000. Hari Seldon, the Asimov-analog in the stories, was an aging mathematician when the stories started, and died early in the first book. The series won a special “Best All-Time Series” Hugo Award in 1966.