By Travis Johnson
Cult fave director Sam Raimi is reportedly currently negotiating to direct The Kingkiller Chronicle, based on Patrick Rothfuss’ fantasy novels, for Lionsgate. This would see him team with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda on the job, the latter having been beavering away on the project as producer for some time now.
Parsing the Variety piece that broke the news, Lionsgate seems to be viewing the adaptation as a film and TV cross-media extravaganza of the type that everybody likes the idea of, but nobody seems to have successfully executed yet (see: The Dark Tower). Good for them. To that end, they’ve enlisted Lindsay Beer, whose credits include a disconcerting number of as-yet-unproduced toy adaptations, to script. She also had a hand in Transformers: The Last Knight, a toy adaptation that perhaps should have stayed unproduced.
Raimi is no stranger to the fantasy genre, of course. He was behind the still-popular TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess back in the day, and was briefly attached to both The Hobbit movies and Warcraft. His last film as director, 2013’s Oz the Great and Powerful, was also a fantasy effort, but it was pants, so adjust your expectations accordingly.
As for the source novels? Penned by the prodigiously-bearded Patrick Rothfuss, the series kicked off in 2007 with The Name of the Wind, telling the story of Kvothe, “…a notorious magician, an accomplished thief, a masterful musician, and an infamous assassin.”, according to the official site. The books have sold in their millions, so clearly a lot of people are picking up what Rothfuss is putting down. Hopefully we can say the same of the adaptation down the track.
