Elizabeth Banks, director of the hugely successful Pitch Perfect 2, is in talks with Universal to direct Red Queen, a sci-fi film about a fantasy world with a caste system organised according to blood colour. Breaking Bad writer Gennifer Hutchison is believed to be adapting Victoria Aveyard’s young adult novel for the screen.
Aveyard’s debut book follows 17-year-old Mare, a red-blooded servant of the silver-blood elite. The silver-bloods possess superhuman abilities, which Mare discovers lie dormant in her. The realisation of her magical power draws her into an unfamiliar, dangerous world in which she must adapt to survive.
Red Queen is the first novel in an as yet incomplete trilogy, meaning the studio is pursuing a possible franchise. Aveyard has expressed her interest in turning the novel into a film in the past, stating: “I see it as a movie and I’m just writing down what’s happening in front of me.”
Following the huge success of dystopian franchise The Hunger Games, in which Banks appears, the studio will be looking to replicate that trilogy’s billion-dollar box office figures.
