Anne Rice's Tale of a Body Thief in Development

[Batman1980]

The vampire Lestat could be heading back to the big-screen.

Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment has optioned the rights to Anne Rice’s Tale of the Body Thief, the fourth book of Rice’s best-selling book series The Vampire Chronicles.

Lestat was first portrayed by Tom Cruise in 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, which was made by Warner Bros. and directed by Neil Jordan. The movie starred Cruise, Brad Pitt, Christian Slater and Kirsten Dunst.

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In 2002, Warners released Queen of the Damned, a big-screen translation of the third book in the Rice series, which starred R&B singer Aaliyah.

Imagine used its partnership with India's Reliance Big Entertainment to fund the acquisition of Body Thief, and it is using the Imagine Reliance Writers Lab to work on the script. Lee Patterson, who wrote a well-regarded screenplay titled Snatched, is working on the Body Thief script.

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Producing with Imagine are Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the writer-producers behind TV’s Fringe and the Star Trek and Transformers movies.

Karen Kehala-Sherwood, the Imagine exec who oversees the lab, and the company’s Erica Huggins, are exec producing.

The hook of the Body Thief is that the story concerns body-switching. Lestat, depressed and lonely after centuries as a vampire, decides to transfer souls for a day with a psychic, who after the transfer reveals that he has no intention of switching back. Lestat, now in a human body and with the help of some friends, must track the man down and get his body back.

The project is not set up at a studio and is in development.

Email: Borys.Kit@thr.com

Source - http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hea...an-orci-287742

[X12Celtics3]

I want the full series, not another one-off. I guess if they are going to do a one-off film, it would be this one... my least favorite book in the series, because it was more like a self-contained blockbuster than the mysterious, mythology-driven books that preceded it and Memnoch (I haven't read The Vampire Armand yet, but I would expect it to be more like the earlier books).

I really want good adaptions of The Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, and Memnoch the Devil, but I feel like they would be very difficult to turn into successful films. I guess this could be cool, at least I can see it turned into a film much more easily than those other books.

[P@t_Mtl]

AT this point I think they just should stop destroying these stories and stop making movies out of them. LetÈs leave them in book format.

[thedarkangel1975]

I liked Interview with a Vampire, but Queen of The Damned was disappointing. I hated how they took parts of The Queen of The Damned and combined it with The Vampire Lestat

[Ator the Invincible]

The first movie was fantastic. But Queen of the Damned failed on almost every level. Still, I'm up for another attempt at the series. If they're not going to reboot and commit to adapting the whole series in order (pipe dream...), then Tale of the Body Thief is a good one-off story to adapt. I'll keep an open mind on this one.

[Scarriere]

Yeah, I love these books as well and don't want another shoddy adaption.
I was greatly disappointed with The Queen Of The Dammed.
An honest take on Lestat by a talented Director would be great!
Jordan maybe?

[Samus Aran]

They're probably gonna cast Taylor Lautner and Channing Tatum and we're gonna have to watch them trying to act like each other.

[SpaceDog]

I think Anne's vampires would work better on HBO or Showtime, but True Blood probably makes that an impossibility.

Interview with a Vampire was a pretty decent movie when all is said and done, but it wouldn't hurt them to go back and start from scratch, being truer to the original novels than they have before.

I enjoyed each of the first 5 novels, perhaps Queen of the Damned the best and Body Thief the least. I think I read the whole of Pandora, and may have pushed all of my way through Vittorio, but after the 5th book I was well into "diminishing returns" territory. I didn't get all the way through Vampire Armand.

[Rambaldi47]

The only thing about Queen of the Damned I liked was the soundtrack. I wanted to like it, but it basically threw the book out the window and did its own thing, which didn't work. Some say it's because Aaliyah died and they had to work with that they had, but I think the script was terrible from the start. I wish they'd start all over with Interview and do proper Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, and the rest.

[SpaceDog]

Originally Posted by Rambaldi47

The only thing about Queen of the Damned I liked was the soundtrack. I wanted to like it, but it basically threw the book out the window and did its own thing, which didn't work. Some say it's because Aaliyah died and they had to work with that they had, but I think the script was terrible from the start. I wish they'd start all over with Interview and do proper Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, and the rest.

As far as I know, QOTD was a "protecting the rights" project from the get-go. I'm surprised it was as "good" as it was. If you are going to spend money protecting your rights to something, you might as well spend more money and make a good project. Why protect the rights of something and concurrently diminish the value of the property?

[theusher]

Anne Rice's ‘Vampire Chronicles’ Series Lands at Universal, Imagine

Universal Pictures has acquired the rights to author Anne Rice's novels in “The Vampire Chronicles” series for Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment to produce with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.

The deal ensures that Universal and Imagine will have an entire body of existing and future novels in Rice's “The Vampire Chronicles” series, including the adapted screenplay for “Tale of the Body Thief,” written by Rice's son, author Christopher Rice. Other novels in the series include “Interview with the Vampire” and the upcoming “Prince Lestat.”

Imagine Entertainment president Erica Huggins will oversee the series on behalf of the company, while Bobby Cohen will executive produce.

Janklow & Nesbit Associates and attorney Christine Cuddy represents both Anne Rice and Christopher Rice, who are also represented by CAA and Resolution, respectively.

Kurtzman and Orci are represented by CAA and attorneys Michael Gendler and Kevin Kelly.

http://www.thewrap.com/anne-rices-va...ersal-imagine/

[olivasauce]

I've read the first 4 books of the series and after reading Bodysnatcher recentley I figured I'd not go on lol. I liked some of the ideas but overall didn't care for it much. In this case I think a better movie can be made by not following the book too closely.

As for the earlier movies, I really liked Interview With a Vampire.

Queen of the Damned I liked in a B movie sort of way. Shame they threw together two books into one pretty incoherent movie. Still, I will get this on bluray someday if I find it cheap enough.

[L.J.]

Really liked the books, to me The Vampire Lestat is the best one. Interview with the Vampire had a great movie adaptation. This sounds like it might be along the lines of Queen of the Danned. Probably not up to par.

[X12Celtics3]

Originally Posted by olivasauce

I've read the first 4 books of the series and after reading Bodysnatcher recentley I figured I'd not go on lol. I liked some of the ideas but overall didn't care for it much. In this case I think a better movie can be made by not following the book too closely.

As for the earlier movies, I really liked Interview With a Vampire.

Queen of the Damned I liked in a B movie sort of way. Shame they threw together two books into one pretty incoherent movie. Still, I will get this on bluray someday if I find it cheap enough.

I loved the books, but I don't think this series would be likely to work out well.

I think that The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned would make great epic, century-spanning films that would warrant a big budget and A-list cast, but the books are kind of all over the place so making the series would be awkward. Interview was already made into a very good film, Tale of the Body Thief is kind of a tonal outlier because of how light and inconsequential it is, Memnoch would probably bore most viewers with its religious and philosophical nature, and Armand is kind of just a retelling of previous books from another character's perspective.

I'd love for these to be good, but I just think they'd have to sacrifice the elements that make this series work in order to achieve mainstream popularity, as is often the case in Hollywood. I think an HBO adaptation would be perfect, but because of True Blood I doubt they'd have another vampire series anytime soon.

[Darkstream]

I agree with all you've said, X12Celtics3.

I actually like the Tale of the Body Thief book, but without reading the earlier books or seeing the other films, I'm not sure how this could work as a stand-alone film for newcomers. It pretty much has to be viewed as a sequel, simply because without any of the earlier stories establishing Lestat and his history as a vampire, the whole point of this movie is lost. But as a sequel, it seems a strange move for this to be made into a film considering this will be the third movie after so much time as passed, it'll be produced by a different studio, and it will star yet another actor (the third) playing Lestat. I'm just surprised anyone would want to make this movie without going back and remaking the entire Vampire Chronicles series from the beginning again.

[theusher]

Read the article again. It's not clear yet if Tale of the Body Thief will be made first or if they'll remake/reboot the whole series, beginning with Interview or Vampire Lestat or whatever. Universal and Imagine now have the rights for ALL of the books in the series (including those already published and not yet published, like Prince Lestat - which is sort of a sequel to The Queen of the Damned from my understanding). A HBO or Netflix series would've been perfect, but, hey, if they can do the books justice and actually make more than one or two films this time I think this may turn up OK.

PS: I've posted this in the Tale of the Body Thief thread since there isn't one for The Vampire Chronicles.

[JeffTheMovieGuy]

I have wanted them to do a remake series ever since Queen of the Damned and give it as much respect as the Harry Potter, Twilight or Hunger Games series, not necessarily saying it should be in the same vein as those films just be filmed one right after the other and should be a 7 movie film series.

Since Vampires are "in" for teen readers it would be nice to show them what a real quality vampire storyline is like when its not written by a internet fan fiction author.

If I were a Hollywood big wig I'd lock it in right now and lock in Dane DeHaan for Lestat.

[Vandal Savage]

It's too bad they didn't make The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned movies with The cast of Interview with the Vampire; that would have made a great trilogy of films.

While it is welcome that we might get some more decent adaptions of these novels, the series really went off the rails some time after Queen of the Damned. There isn't a lot of narrative coherence on anything after QotD though I did find Tale of the Body Thief to be an interesting novel, it probably won't make a satisfying "vampire" movie. The later novels all seem like they're building up to something big but never do. If they are in this for the long haul, then it is going to take a lot of massaging in order to make Body Thief and anything else that follows into watchable movies.

And also, as the series goes on, it become intertwined with the Mayfair witches, so that could problematic as well, depending on who has the rights to that those characters. Though I doubt they'll make it to the seventh book, and the less said about Blood Canticle, the better.

[Darkstream]

Ahhh, so it would seem that the deal isn't just for Tale of the Body Thief, but for the entire Vampire Chronicles. This makes much more sense. Hopefully now we'll get an actual adaptation of The Vampire Lestat book.


http://www.deadline.com/2014/08/univ...re-chronicles/

[octagon]

As counterintuitive as it might seem The Vampire Chronicles could make an interesting candidate for Universal's version of the MCU. Lestat and Louis are decent tentpole characters. Armand, Marius and the Talamasca could make interesting spinoff entries and Queen of the Damned could make for a nice Avengers-like mashup. I could even see stingers at the end of every film

The only problem is the bigger you make these, the more pressure there will be to tone down the content. It might be a little hard to sell Universal on sinking of hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into these movies and telling half their potential audience 'thanks but no thanks'.

I would almost prefer they stay away from big budgets and a-listers.