Bekmambetov Adopts Lunar Boy

Adapting Stephen Tunney's novel

Bekmambetov Adopts Lunar Boy

by Owen Williams |
Published on

On the lookout for his next project following Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Timur Bekmambetov has picked up the rights to **One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy, the 2010 novel by Stephen Tunney.

The book is set two thousand years in the future, when Mankind has abandoned its terraforming project on the Moon, leaving it and its colonists to an uncertain fate. Hieronymous Rexaphin lives there, and has developed a condition that allows him to see the fourth primary colour, which somehow means he can also see the future of all time and matter. He has to wear goggles, because looking into his eyes kills people, which causes problems when he falls in love with Earth-girl Windows Falling On Sparrows. Cue an exciting adventure in which the pair must go on the run to avoid incarceration on the Dark Side Of The Moon...

So that's unusual.

If it helps, you might find some context in the knoweldge that Stephen Tunney also goes by the name of Dogbowl. He was a founder-member of art-rockers King Missile (he's on Take Stuff From Work), and his sole previous novel, 1993's Flan, is about the epnoymous hero on an odyssey across a blasted Bosch-like America, accompanied by his talking goldfish Ginger Kang Kang.

Quite what Bekmambetov plans to do with One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy is unclear. Variety describe the book as "a visually inventive world with a powerful coming-of-age story about a boy finding his place in the universe", which is horribly reductive, but might be a useful angle for Bekmambetov to take in trying to make the project palatable for a studio. Then we'd just have to hope that he took a suitably crazy line once shooting started. We're thinking Scott Pilgrim might be a kind of template. But then, Scott Pilgrim didn't do very well, box office-wise...

The man currently tasked with hammering the novel into screenplay shape is Edward Ricourt, who hasn't yet got a completed film under his belt, but whose Now You See Me is currently in production, directed by Louis Leterrier and starring Jesse Eisenberg and Morgan Freeman. He's also written the optioned screenplays Year 12 and How To Defeat Your Own Clone.

That last title, along with the fact that Now You See Me is about magicians who moonlight as bank robbers, suggests that he might be just the man for this job.

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