While the box office for Sony’s English-language adaption of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo might not have been as big as expected given the popularity of the Stieg Larsson’s source novel and the critical praise that the original Swedish adaption has received, but the studio has decided to continue forward with adapting the two other books in Larsson’s Millennium series.

As it stands now, the David Fincher-directed adaption is projected to barely break the $100 million mark for ticket sales. (It’s current box office take is currently just shy of $77 million according to Box Office Mojo). Compared to the film’s production costs and the intensive marketing campaign the studio bankrolled, that’s not enough for Sony to break even. However, the film is just starting to roll out into foreign markets and the studio brass is bullish that the film will clear more in the neighborhood of $300 million by the time that is completed.

Banking on that outcome, Sony has already put to work Dragon Tattoo screenwriter Steve Zaillian on adapting the second book in Larsson’s trilogy, The Girl Who Played With Fire with an eye towards getting the film before cameras by late 2012 or early 2013.

Of course, there are a number of unknowns concerning the project and the presumably eventual adaption of the third book, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. There have been rumors that the two films would shoot back-to-back, though the studio has apparently not made that decision. More interesting, is the fact that it looks like Dragon Tattoo director David Fincher’s participation in the second or even third film has not yet been determined. Presumably when he signed on for the first film there was an option in his contract for all three, but it remains to be seen whether Sony will exercise that option or not.

As to the script for Fire, Deadline is reporting that Zaillian is making some changes to the original book’s plot line, reportedly to bring titular hero Lisbeth Salander into more focus in the film than she is in the Larsson’s original novel, which keeps her separated from hero Mikael Blomkvist for much of its plot. I would assume that Zaillian is looking at ways to have the two working more together through his screenplay.

Can the studio do better with a sequel? Although rare, it is not unheard of. Deadline’s report hints that the studio realizes that it might have made a mistake releasing a dark, R-rated film during the year-end, holiday season, quoting an anonymous studio as exec as saying “It was too cocky of us. We might think about that next time.” I have a feeling that the English-version of Dragon Tattoo will really find its audience once it hits home video later this year thanks to some award season wins and that income from DVD and blu-ray sales will help seal the deal for Sony to give the go-ahead on getting the sequels in front of the cameras as quickly as they can.

Let’s face it, the studios all hope that any new film they release will be successful enough to spawn a franchise. It should come as no surprise then that Paramount has plans to expand their upcoming adaption of Max Brooks’ zombie novel World War Z into a trilogy if the film turns out to be a hit.

The news comes from a LA Times interview with World War Z star and producer Brad Pitt, with the paper describing the film’s tone as having “the grounded, gun-metal realism of, say, [Matt] Damon’s Jason Bourne [film] series tethered to the unsettling end-times vibe of AMC’s The Walking Dead.”

In the film, direct by Quantum Of Solace‘s Marc Forster, Pitt is playing Gerry Lane, a UN fact finder racing to the cause of a zombie outbreak that threatens the globe.

Given the nature of Brooks’ book, there is certainly a lot of material to plumb for potential sequels. For the uninitiated, the book is presented as a collection of records, interviews and documents gathered after the zombie outbreak had been contained that attempts to explain how the situation spread out of control. The original screenplay for the project by J. Michael Straczynski kept this conceit and had its main character traveling the country collecting the stories and documents that are found in the book. Reportedly, script rewrites from Matthew Michael Carnahan have given the film a more straightforward narrative structure, which I have to confess I find the prospect of a bit disappointing. If enough people by tickets next December following the film’s release we’ll get to see how they intend to take the book and flesh out a further story.

Lionsgate is moving forward on a new adaption of Bret Easton Ellis’ dark social satire American Psycho. The studio has hired Noble Jones to write a screenplay for a new big screen version of the novel. Given that Nobel’s credits include some music video and commercial directing, as well as being the second unit director on The Social Network, it is a good bet that this may also be his feature film directorial debut.

The book was famously adapted in 2000 by writer/director Mary Harron and which starred Christian Bale as the deranged yuppie serial killer Patrick Bates. Its premier at the Sundance Film Festival caused a stir and split audiences into ardent “love it” and “hate it” factions.

Variety broke the story, indicating that Jones had already turned in his first draft of the script. Deadline adds that the screenplay is “a down and dirty new version that imagines how yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman would fare in New York today.”

Normally, I would say that there hasn’t been enough time passed before we should be contemplating a new adaption of American Psycho. Especially given the classic stature of the original film, which Ellis himself has given a seal of approval to. But given the changes that New York City and society in general has gone through in the 12 years since 2000, I think that there’s plenty for the screenplay to explore. Keeping the character of Patrick as some sort of Wall Street investment banker will certainly resonate more than it even did 11 years ago. While I have doubts that it can or will live up to the shocking power that Harron’s film had, there is certainly potential for it to carve out it’s own reputation.

George R. R. Martin’s mutiple-writer anthology series Wild Cards has been picked by Syfy Films to be the first film from the joint venture between the SyFy Channel and Universal Pictures. An adaption of Martin’s other book series, A Game Of Thrones, has proven to be a big hit for HBO.

Wild Cards is a science-fiction twist on standard superhero tropes. Following the end of World War Two, an alien virus is released over New York City, killing 90% of those infected, and leaving 9% with some form of physical mutation. But there was a lucky 1% who survived the virus with some sort of beneficial superpower. Growing out of a long-running role-playing that Martin ran with many of the anthology’s contributors as players, the book series charted how the history of the 20th century was changed economically, politically and socially. the series debuted in 1987 and has more than 20 volumes between four different publishers.

Melinda Snodgrass, who has contributed to the book series has been tapped to write the series. SyFy Films was established last December as a boutique studio to produce films in the $5 to $25 million range.

Ever since A Game Of Thrones was a hit for HBO, I have been waiting for someone to option this series for either television or film. And this is certainly a much better project than many of the made-for-tv productions that SyFy has been associated in the past. I’m a little concerned that the planned budgetary range Syfy announced when it formed might be a little on the low side for a Wild Cards film. But then again, many of the stories aren’t big epic superhero stories, but more “street level” tales. But with Snodgrass on the writing detail, I don’t think we need fear that the film will stray from its roots.

There are some that might say that doing a big screen version of Stephen King’s The Stand is a bit superfluous. After all, there was quite good six-hour ABC miniseries that did the tome justice back in 1994, one which could be bought at Amazon for $24.99 (and contains a copy of The Langoliers and The Golden Years as well).

However, Hollywood being what it is and the miniseries being almost 20 years old, Warner Brothers is dead set on bringing the novel to the big screen. At least they have gone in a good direction for…well…a director.

Deadline is reporting that Warner Brothers has tapped Ben Affleck to helm the big screen version of King’s seminal work. Harry Potter‘s David Yates was recently said to be in negotiations for the director’s chair.

While Affleck might have been the bomb in Phantoms, yo, he has made his name in recent years as a director, receiving good notices for Gone Baby Gone and The Town. Those good notices were well deserved, but he is entering new territory. The Stand is a sweeping epic that had trouble fitting into a six-hour TV miniseries. You can’t imagine Affleck having any more than half that amount of time to tell the same amount of plot. Good luck to you sir.

It seems that producers for the planned adaption of Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel Pride & Prejudice & Zombies can’t catch a break. When they aren’t trying to keep a director on the project, they’ve been unsuccessfully out trying to court an actress to play the lead role. Today, the latest actress to turn them down is Blake Lively. She joins a list of actresses that include Scarlett Johansson, Emma Stone, Anne Hathaway, Mia Wasikowska, and Natalie Portman.

Let’s face it, this is not a good sign. Cycling through a number of A-list actresses and now starting to move into the upper reaches of the B-list where Lively resides is starting to give the project a bit of a stink that will make it even harder to land someone in the role. Compounding the problem is that current director Craig Gillespie is not the first to occupy that position, notably replacing Mike White who succeeded David O. Russell.

The only way that I see this film getting some traction towards getting made is if Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, an adaption of the novel also be Grahame-Smith, does well when it gets released next year. If that makes some money at the box office, I would expect everyone would suddenly want to be in the monster mash-up business.

Twentieth Century Fox will be adapting Isaac Asimov’sclassic science-fiction murder mystery The Caves Of Steel. Henry Hobson has been assigned to direct the film while John Scott 3 is writing the screenplay. The project will be the second teaming of the two who are currently in pre-production on the zombie film Maggie.

First serialized in Galaxy magazine in 1953 and then published in book form in 1954, The Caves Of Steel is set in some three thousand years in the future where everyone on Earth lives in cities that are covered by vast steel domes resulting in a population that suffers from extreme agoraphobia. Following the murder of an ambassador from one of the off-world Earth colonies, detective Elijah Baley is assigned to track down the killer. He is given a partner, R. Daneel Olivaw, a nearly perfect humanoid robot. The problem is that Baley shares the common Earther prejudices against robots.

Asimov wrote the novel in part due to a conversation he had with editor John Campbell who stated that science-fiction and mystery were two genres that couldn’t be combined. The novel is now considered one of the classics in science-fiction and an important work for its broadening the scope of what could be written about in the genre.  It is also a keystone of Asimov’s Robot series of short stories and books.

Previously, Fox had done a very loose adaption of Asimov’s short story collection I, Robot, which outside of a few names and a passing acknowledgement of Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics,” had nothing really to do with the book. The failing there was trying to find a narrative thread to link those stories, although an attempt to adapt the book into a screenplay in the late 1970s by writer Harlan Ellison managed the trick. (Ellison published his screenplay in 1994.)

Via Deadline.

It can be heartbreaking being a Terry Gilliam fan. For whatever reason, the visionary director often has trouble securing financing for his films and even when he does, there can still be problems that keep him from getting a project made (see Lost in LaMancha).

So it’s with a dash of caution in my optimism that I report that Gilliam is currently working on a screenplay for a new film, an adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel Mr. Vertigo.

According to The Real Gilliam Fan, the director was at Era New Horizons Film Festival in Poland doing and Question & Answer session and revealed –

I got a book. It’s called ‘Mr. Vertigo’ by Paul Auster. And I’m actually working on a script of it at the moment. Doesn’t mean it will be a film; but I’m working on a script.

You have to admire Gilliam’s self-deprecating sense of humor.

I have to admit that I am not all that familiar with Auster as a novelist. I do know that he collaborated with Wayne Wang on the stories for the films The Center Of The World, Smoke and Blue In The Face and helped with the direction of the latter two films as well.

From the description of the plot on Wikipedia, it does sound like a story that could be right up Gilliam’s alley -

It tells the story of a young orphaned boy from St. Louis, Walter Claireborne Rawley, who happens upon a mysterious traveler known only as Master Yehudi. Master Yehudi trains Walter to fly and they begin traveling across the United States performing this feat at circus sideshows. Many times they are faced with hardships such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Chicago Mob, and Walter’s drunken uncle, Slim.

Why am I picturing a film that looks like Gilliam had directed Big Fish? We’ll see if this project comes to fruition.

With his Cowboys & Aliens opening in just a few days, Harrison Ford has already lined up his next cowboy role in an adaption of the novel Black Hats.

Ford will be playing an ageing Waytt Earp, his best days behind him at the dawn of the 20^th century.

The novel, written by Max Allan Collins under the pen name of Patrick Culhane, mixes fact with fiction. It focuses on the time in Earp’s life when was a film consultant on silent film westerns in the boomtown of Hollywood (fact). In the book, he meets up with the son of his old friend Doc Holliday and helps him keep a young Al Capone from trying to take over the young Holliday’s New York City speakeasy (fiction).

Reportedly, Ford was intrigued by the idea of playing a gunfighter in 1920’s New York.

Currently, 300 writer Kurt Johnstad is set to script the project. No director has been attached yet.

Via Hollywood Reporter.

Out of all the numerous science-fiction novels that I read as a teenager, one of the few that made a lasting impression on me was D. F. Jones’s Colossus. A Cold War riff on the Frankenstein story, it featured a supercomputer that is designed to control the country’s entire nuclear arsenal gaining sentience and slowly taking control of the country. Things get even worse when the computer detects the existence of its opposite number in the Soviet Union. The book was turned into a film in 1968 and director Joseph Sargent managed to capture an air of paranoia in the proceedings that made for a nice thriller. It also served as a forerunner to such films as War Games, Eagle Eye and a host of others.

Universal is hoping to bring a new version of the book to theaters and has just hired Law & Order: LA writer Blake Masters to work on the screenplay for the project. The studio has been trying to adapt the book for some time, though the lack of news on the project for some time had lead me to believe that it was very probably dead.

The previous writer on the project was Jason Rothenberg. Reportedly, Rothenberg’s draft used elements of the two sequels that Jones wrote – The Fall of Colossus (1974) and Colossus and the Crab (1977) – thought it remains to be seen if that approach will be continued or if Masters will draw strictly from the original novel.

It’s not known if this new version will retain the original novel’s time period or if it will be set in the modern day. With the all-pervasiveness of the internet these days, a modern setting could be quite effective for the story.

Via Variety.