13 May – Hot on the heels of the recent announcement that Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book" will be made into a feature film comes the news that MGM has recently acquired the screen rights for Ray Bradbury's "From The Dust Returned", a book that bears similarities with the former, according to Deadline.
For those who did not know, Bradbury is one of the most celebrated American writers of speculative fiction between the 20th and 21st century, and many of his works have already been adapted into television shows or films. For example, Bradbury was hired by director John Huston to work on the screenplay for the 1956 film "Moby Dick", which starred Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab, Richard Basehart as Ishmael, and Orson Welles as Father Mapple.
Other works by Bradbury include the 1983 horror film "Something Wicked This Way Comes", starring Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce, and the 2005 film "A Sound of Thunder" as well as Ashton Kutcher's "The Butterfly Effect", which revolves around the same theory and contains many references to its inspiration.
"From The Dust Returned" is a collection of short stories that was published in 2002. Its central character is a mortal boy named Timothy who is adopted by a family of benevolent ghouls. The stories are told as a series of vignettes from Timothy's point of view, and reveal the eccentric ghouls that comprise his family. His parents are loving vampires while his teen sister Cecy can teleport into the bodies of other mortals to experience human emotions despite being immobilized and bed-ridden, and Uncle Einar is a green-winged vampire who serves as a human kite for Timothy.
Zack Snyder, who is best known for directing "300" and "Watchmen", was first touted to direct, but due to other prior commitments, he dropped out. Currently no replacement has been named.
