Columbia Pictures Wins Rights To Develop Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ Epic

January 16, 2009 by tcgames

GetTheBigPicture.net announces here that Columbia Pictures is developing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation as a film project. The series has been ingrained in my head for years, as I’m sure anyone who has read it, so it will be interesting to see how the filmmakers’ vision of this classic turns out…

Roland Emmerich will direct the Isaac Asimov science fiction trilogy Foundation as a feature film for Columbia, Variety reports today. Columbia won the screen rights Thursday through an old fashioned thumb wrestling war.

OK, so it was an auction…

The influential series dates back almost 70 years, when the trilogy was first presented as eight short stories in Astounding Magazine in 1942, and introduced readers to humans living on various planets throughout the galaxy, living under the thumb of the Galactic Empire. One man who can look into the future sees the whole galaxy collapsing, “and sets to work preparing to save the knowledge of mankind.” Always have a backup disc, people.

But that story may be less interesting than how this deal got made. Apparently, Fox would’ve been compensated for its development costs had it been turned into a film before its option lapsed. However, Warner Bros. apparently saw this deal as troublesome in light of its own negotiations over Watchmen.

Source: GetTheBigPicture.net

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