‘Smallville’ Showrunners in Talks to Direct Young-Adult Feature ‘Homelanders’ (Exclusive)

Miles Chapman has been hired to pen Summit’s adaptation of Homelanders, a young-adult book series by Andrew Klavan. Screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, best known as the showrunners of TV’s Smallville, are working with Chapman in developing Homelanders and, while no deals are made, are in talks to make their directorial debut on it.

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Lorenzo Di Bonaventura is producing while Di Bonaventura Pictures’ David Ready is exec producing.

The books, described as The Bourne Identity crossed with Disturbia, centers on a high school student who wakes up to find himself tied to a chair, not knowing where he is or how a whole year has passed. After he manages to escape, he embarks on an adventure to find out why terrorists and the authorities are after him.

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Summit and the filmmakers are inserting a sci-fi element to the story.

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Two Homelanders books have been published – The Homelanders: The Last Thing I Remember and The Homelanders: The Long Way Home. The books are the first young adult novels by Klavan, who is known for writing thrillers, two of which have been adapted: True Crime, directed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say a Word, a Michael Douglas vehicle co-starring Brittany Murphy.

Summit, home of the Twilight blockbusters, is looking at Homelanders as another possible teen franchise.

For Chapman, the deal reunites him with the studio that picked up his spec The Tomb, which currently has Antoine Fuqua attached to direct and Bruce Willis attached to star. The scribe, who first worked with di Bonaventura on a ABC pilot titles Priceless, just rewrote back to back action projects Four 50s and Slipknot, both for Relativity.

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Gough and Millar, who are showrunning ABC’s fall Charlie’s Angels TV series and have worked on movies such as Spider-Man 2 and Shanghai Noon, are also helping to develop an adaptation of comic Existence 2.0, now called Upgrade. They are not attached to diect Upgrade. 

Chapman is repped by Paradigm and Gotham Group.Gough and Millar are repped by CAA.

Email: Borys.Kit@thr.com

Twitter: @Borys_Kit