Pierce Brown’s Red Rising has spent more than a decade in development tunnels deeper than any Helldiver’s shaft, and somebody has finally struck daylight. Paramount has acquired the film rights to Brown’s bestselling series and hired Francis Lawrence to direct an adaptation of the first novel. The Hollywood Reporter broke the story, with Deadline and Variety confirming the deal on 16 October.
Justin Rhodes is writing the script. His credits include Terminator: Dark Fate and Prime Video’s animated anthology Secret Level, and he has previously worked with Lawrence on Netflix’s long-gestating BioShock film, so both men already know a thing or two about waiting for a project to surface. Lawrence will produce through his company about:blank with Cameron MacConomy, alongside Francesco Goedhuis, while Brown serves as executive producer. There’s no cast and no release date yet, which spares everyone a few months of arguing about who looks most convincing with a Gold sigil on the back of their hand.
For anyone yet to descend, the 2014 novel is set on a colonised Mars run along a colour-coded caste system, with the Golds lounging at the top and the Reds toiling underground, told that their mining is terraforming the planet for future generations. Darrow, a young Red miner, discovers that the surface was made habitable long ago and his people have been kept below as slave labour. After a devastating loss, he is surgically remade as a Gold and sent to bring down the ruling class from the inside, starting at an academy where the elite’s children are encouraged to bludgeon one another for status. Which brings us, rather neatly, to the choice of director.
Comparisons with The Hunger Games have trailed Red Rising since the day it was published, so handing it to the man behind five Hunger Games films is either inspired or the studio simply deciding to stop fighting it. Lawrence’s prequel The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping arrives on 20 November, and he also made last year’s Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk. His CV is now essentially a long list of young people made to suffer for an audience. He is, to be fair, extremely good at it.
There’s a pleasing twist in the tale, too. When Marc Forster was attached to an earlier film attempt back in 2014, the word was that Paramount was the studio least likely to land it, thanks to lingering frostiness after the troubled production of World War Z. Twelve years, a collapsed Universal film and an abandoned TV version later (Brown said in March that the series was no longer going ahead), Paramount owns it anyway. Darrow, who knows a thing or two about the long game, would approve.
The bigger question is how much of Brown’s ever-expanding saga will make it to the cinema. The original trilogy has grown into six books, with a seventh and final novel, Red God, still to come, and the later instalments escalate from academy bloodsport to wars spanning the solar system. For now, though, Paramount is starting with book one. Very sensible. Any Red will tell you that you dig one level at a time.
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