Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves Gets TV Adaptation at Legendary

Summary

• Legendary TV acquires rights to Sci-Fi series Seveneves based on award-winning novel by Neal Stephenson.
• Producer Allison Friedman is onboard for the adaptation. The TV series plans to stick close to the novel’s powerful storyline.
• Skydance Media and Imagine Entertainment were also developing Seveneves as a feature film project. Strong audience response may fast-track production.

A new post-apocalyptic sci-fi series, Seveneves, is in development, with Legendary acquiring the television rights to adapt Neal Stephenson’s famous novel. The series, based on the novel of the same name, which won a Hugo Award and a Prometheus Award in 2016, is described as a futuristic space saga that delves deep into science fiction and dystopian themes.

Allison Friedman, an award-winning producer and film executive, who has produced the hit horror film The Mortuary Collection and the sci-fi feature The Fix, will executive produce the series. While Legendary Television hasn’t revealed much about Seveneves, the story should be fairly accurate to the novel on which it is based. The summary reads as follows:

“Written by Stephenson, the bestselling author of Anathem, Snow Crash, Zodiac, and Termination Shock, the story takes place in the near future when a meteor shatters the moon into several pieces, resulting in an unfixable calamity for the Earth in two years. As the world’s biggest scientific minds come together, they determine that the ‘hard rain’ would render Earth uninhabitable, uniting the globe despite the ongoing issues.

With time running out for the human race, world leaders try to evacuate as many people as possible to Cloud Ark, humanity’s only chance of survival. Five thousand years later, three billion humans, divided into seven races known as Seveneves, send their prodigies to explore the very planet that their ancestors had called home. What awaits the newly evolved humankind on its ambitious expedition into the unknown world?”

Even though this is the novel’s first television adaptation, Skydance Media and Imagine Entertainment hired screenwriter William Boyles, director Ron Howard, and producer Brian Gazer in 2016 to turn it into a feature film, which is currently in the development stage and has received no updates thus far. Having said that, if the forthcoming series gets a strong response from audiences, they may very well consider advancing the film past the development stage.

Seveneves Has Received High Praise, Including From a Former President

The book has received high praise from many readers across the world, including President Obama, who added it to his Summer Reading List. The novel’s merits go beyond its distinctive storytelling because of the author, Stephenson.

Neal Stephenson is not only a bestselling author, but also a recognized futurist who worked on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Google’s Magic Leap in the early 2000s and mid-2010s, respectively. As a result, his experience validates the research he did for Seveneves and the influential writing that has captivated many creative minds, including Bill Gates, John Carmack, and Peter Thiel.

Furthermore, Legendary Television is well-known for producing numerous prominent TV shows, like Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Lost in Space, and Night Sky, which gives us some optimism regarding the upcoming adaptation, which, if done right, could become something similar to the CW’s The 100.

No release date, cast, and other details concerning Seveneves have been revealed yet.