Sony Entertainment wins bidding war for award-winning trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
Sony Entertainment’s Tristar Pictures has reportedly won the movie rights to the Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin.
Though the exact amount hasn’t been made public, the bid that closed the deal is reported to be in the range of seven figures, making it Sony’s second big literary buy in recent days. Earlier this week, the company acquired the rights to the upcoming City of Fire books by Don Winslow for an amount also said to be in the seven-figure range.
Earning the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row, Jemisin’s trilogy – The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky – take place on a futuristic Earth blighted by seasonal catastrophes. With the only hope of surviving a ‘season’ found inside one of the walled communities that pepper the landscape, people must work to earn themselves a place behind walls or risk trying to survive the apocalypse on their own. Populated by castes ranging from the Orogenes – people with the ability to control geologic energy and temperature – to a race of moving sculptures called Stone Eaters, the series offers some of the most startlingly original and inventive storytelling to come out of the genre in years, and with a little luck should make for a dazzling cinematic experience.
With Jemisin herself in charge of writing the scripts for the adaptations, one hopes that the story will hew fairly close to the source material. The first book in the series, The Fifth Season, was picked up for a TV series in 2007 by TNT, but word on the project has been none-existent ever since. At this point, though, any form of adaptation is cause for excitement among the trilogy’s devoted fanbase.
