Gavin Hood to Direct Ender’s Game?

Posted by on September 21st, 2010   Filed under: Books/Comics, Rumours, Sci-fi
Source: L.A. Times

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is one of the many seminal sci-fi novels that has had a difficult time making it to the big screen over the years. Despite its popularity, the fact that the story focuses on a group of young children being trained for war has not made it an easy sell — not to mention the fact that it involves some large scale space battles that would probably require extensive special effects work. A couple of years back, Wolfgang Petersen was attached to direct, but after he left the project it all seemed to fall apart. Fortunately, we have learned this week that an Ender’s Game movie is still a distinct possibility, and this week there are reports that they’ve found a new director in Gavin Hood.

According to the 24 Frames blog, the movie is being produced by Odd Lot Entertainment (The Spirit, Drive, Rabbit Hole), and Hood has come on board the project as a potential director after doing a rewrite of Orson Scott Card’s script. His most recent film was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which certainly wasn’t great, but I don’t know if that was entirely his fault. His 2005 film Tsotsi won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, so he’s clearly a talented guy.

Really it all depends on whether or not his vision will jive with Orson Scott Card, who continues to be heavily involved in the movie adaptation. He is determined to make a film that focuses on human relationships first and foremost, rather than action and special effects. The more I think about it, the more I think this movie could be great, but the tone is going to be tricky, and finding a great child actor is going to be even harder. Maybe they can jump on the Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road, Let Me In) bandwagon before he gets too old. What do you think, can Ender’s Game work on the big screen, and is Gavin Hood a good choice to direct?



  • Cassandra

    My first reaction to this was “NOOOO!” and I even said it out loud. This is a book that not only have I always thought would be tainted if made into a movie but it’s a book for kids who hate reading. I’ve known so many people who have said that Ender’s Game is the only reason they ever started reading books but now with a movie that will all be gone. However reading that Orson Scott Card himself is working on it makes me feel a lot better but I’m still definitely torn on this one.

  • Paul Andrews

    I have to say that I thought this book was hugely predictable. I’ll not be holding my breath for this one.

  • evilhomer

    I love this book, so I am hoping they do it justice.

  • Kurt

    I love this book, I read it every couple of years and I would love to see it come out as a film (yea, several false starts on this one). But I do believe the best window for maximum impact of the story would have been in the mid-to-late 1990s, people are far too familiar with where the story goes, no in terms of being aware of the novel (which has a lot of fans in the sci-fi world) but that so many films have used this sort of storytelling angle to the point that one of the originals would look like a clone.

    I’d love to see a very unconventional director (which is not Gavin Hood!) take the style and aesthetics of the story in a radical or non-paint-by-numbers fashion. I’d love to see Joe Dante tackle this at $100M budget, or Guillermo del Toro, or heck, Spike Jonze.

  • Colin

    The movie is unfilmable… move along.

  • Ian

    I still need to read this book but the author’s involvement and intentions sound promising in terms of what sort of final product we might see if we ever see one. I mean any good space battle is made that much better when the human interactions leading up to it and culminating during it matter. The best way to raise the stakes and increase the value of the spectacle is to handle the other elements of the Poetics properly first.

  • TheAllKnowingGod

    WHO???????

  • Steve

    I thought Dune was unfilmable too until David Lynch came around and… proved me right! Dune, Starship Troopers and Ender’s Game are the trio of Sci-Fi novels I just don’t think are filmable. Unless you’re prepared to commit huge budgets, talented crews and pull no punches (similar to Peter Jackson’s all-in effort of LOTR).

    I don’t know much about Hood other than Wolverine being total garbage. Film Junk is too kind in excusing mistakes. I have no doubt that there was a corporate hand in the filming of Wolverine but to make him blameless is naive, no-one forced him to direct it under duress or with a gun to his head. He attempted to direct what should have been a simple paycheque film with basic story and action scenes and it failed even with those lowered expectations.

  • Steve

    ^ Referring to the above.

    When I say these 3 are ‘unfilmable’ I refer to them being extremely difficult to adapt seriously. Both the Dune and Starship Troopers films took the camp approach. Lynch’s Dune was a bizarre and ugly mess with Sting in a codpiece. Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, while fun and extremely kitschy, was Starship Troopers only in name. If I wasn’t told it was based on the novel, I’d have thought it was some campy throw-back or an 80s cartoon adaption.

  • Paul Andrews

    Personally I loved David Lynch’s Dune, but let’s not forget that the ‘Frank Herbert’s Dune’ and ‘Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune’ were two of the three highest rated programmes ever broadcast on the Sci-Fi channel. Even ignoring the DL version it could be argued that Dune has already been adapted successfully – and on a smallish budget. The Dune books will always be the best medium though – the film and TV series are great, but read the books first.