Speaking to the LA Times this week about his new novel, Ender in Exile, Orson Scott Card revealed that the long-suffering movie adaptation of his Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel Ender’s Game (1985) has finally been put out of its misery. Ender in Exile fills in the missing years between Ender’s Game, in which the child protagonist and military genius Ender Wiggin saves humanity from annihilation by the Formics, an alien bug-like race (aka the buggers!), and Speaker for the Dead (1986), which picks up the story years later when Ender is 35.
As with many novel to film adaptations the gestation of the Ender’s Game project has been long and troubled. Back in 2003 Card submitted his own screenplay to Warner Bros. but while the Studio clearly liked the idea, it can't have been convinced by the script because it brought David Benioff (Troy) and Dan Weiss on board to rewrite it at about the time that Wolfgang Petersen (Troy) was attached to helm the movie. Although Card told IGN in 2007 that he’d never personally read Benioff and Weiss’s script, he was nonetheless unhappy with the direction that things were taking, commenting that he wasn’t interested in a "tough-hero action film", instead imagining a "film where the human relationships are absolutely essential - an honest presentation of the story."
Ironically, his dissatisfaction appears to have been felt equally by Warners as it put the project into turnaround in 2007, clearly happy to off-load it to any other studio willing to fork out the cost of development. Card undertook to write an entirely new script, telling IGN that it wouldn’t be based on his own previous attempt or Benioff and Weiss’s. Back then both he and the producers were "very happy" with the current draft.
But it seems no one else was and financing has not been forthcoming and the plug has now been pulled on the project.
If, as I suspect, the Studios were more interested in a "tough-hero action film" rather than "an honest presentation of the story”, this is probably good news.
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