Shawn Levy - Getty - H 2016
Getty ImagesFox is taking a big bite into the vampire genre, picking up the rights to the novel A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising by Raymond Villareal.
Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen of 21 Laps, the production company behind the Oscar-nominated sci-fi drama Arrival as well as Netflix’s hit Stranger Things, will produce the adaptation.
The novel was taken into all of the studios and engendered a small bidding war, with a deal that went into the high six figures.
Pitched as a sort of World War Z or Robopocalypse with vampires, the tome is an fictitious oral history of the appearance, assimilation and ultimately epic, violent confrontation of vampires (who now prefer being called the Gloamings) with the human race.
Like World War Z (the book), the book is told from multiple points of view and spans a considerable time period, tracking a CDC investigator who discovers a mysterious virus; an FBI agent who forms the first Gloaming Crimes Unit; a civil rights attorney’s analysis of the Gloaming Equal Rights Act (complete with Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion); an obsessive Vatican librarian; a celebrity gossip site; a theological magazine, among others.
Since hitting it big with Arrival, which landed eight Oscar nominations, and Stranger Things, the come-from-nowhere sensation, 21 Laps has been striking while the iron is hot. The deal for Vampire comes less than two weeks after 21 Laps set up another feature project, an untitled project based on Inconstant Moon, a short story written by Larry Niven, the author behind the sci-fi literary classic Ringworld.
CAA repped Villareal in the deal.
