Elton John once sang that Mars is not the kind of place to raise your kids, but it would appear that Hollywood is happy to keep setting its movies there. And with John Carter Of Mars already hard at work, another literary Red Planet denizen might join it on the big screen as Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles has apparently been optioned.
According to the LA Times’ sources, Fox-based producer Jon Davis, who helped bring the world Alien Vs Predator and I Robot, has grabbed up the rights to Bradbury’s famous short story collection with a plan to turn it into a movie.
The book, published in 1950, has been adapted for the screen before, albeit the smaller one: it was the source material for a miniseries that featured Rock Hudson and Bernadette Peters. Now, though, with Avatar’s after effects (not to mention profits) pulsing through executives’ veins and budgets, you’ve got to figure Fox might just leap at the idea of bringing Bradbury’s effective prose to cinemas.
**Chronicles **charts various human journeys to Mars and the interactions they end up having with the natives, not all of them friendly. But while the writer layered in a healthy subtext of philosophical curiosity, we’re not sure that would survive the translation into a movie.
Should this one take off, we expect it to arrive in 3D within the next couple of years.