Raymond A. Villareal's Blog, page 3

'Arrival' Producers Plotting Movie Pitched as 'World War Z' With Vampires

"Fox won a bidding war for the rights to a book by Raymond Villareal.

Fox 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."

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Fox, Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps Wins Big Auction For ‘World War Z’ With Vampires

"EXCLUSIVE: 20th Century Fox and Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps made a big book acquisition in pre-empting the Raymond A. Villareal novel A People’s History Of The Vampire Uprising. Levy and Dan Cohen will produce. The book just sold to Little, Brown in a four-publisher auction; it was landed by Josh Kendall at Little, Brown imprint Mulholland Books, and will be published next year. Fox got the jump and made the preemptive film deal while Sony circled for Josh Bratman’s Immersive Pictures, Universal for Robert Kirkman’s Skybound, and Lionsgate for 3 Arts.

The book is most easily characterized as a World War Z with vampires. The novel is an “oral history” of the appearance, assimilation, and ultimately epic and violent confrontation of vampires with the human race. It chronicles the rise of the vampires, who call themselves “The Gloaming,” from multiple points of view: the CDC investigator who discovers a mysterious virus; the FBI agent who forms the first Gloaming Crimes Unit; a civil rights attorney’s analysis of the Gloaming Equal Rights Act; an obsessive Vatican librarian; and even TMZ.

Levy’s 21 Laps is coming off an elevated genre triumph in the Denis Villenueve-directed Arrival, which has grossed $191 million worldwide and is up for eight Oscars, including Best Picture. 21 Laps is also coming off PGA and SAG wins for its Netflix series Stranger Things, and the Bryan Cranston-James Franco Fox comedy Why Him? grossed $114 million on a $35 million budget.

This comes as Paramount just announced it has pulled its World War Z sequel off the release schedule for a June 9 release, as Brad Grey and producer-star Brad Pitt continue to prevail upon his Fight Club director David Fincher to take the leap into the continuation of the epic zombie saga. They’ve been talking with Fincher since last fall, and landing him continues to be a big studio priority if it doesn’t bust the budget. WWZ is based on the Max Brooks oral history postmortem novel about a global zombie infestation. The screen adaptation was a troubled shoot which required a significant re-shoot of a new third act. Despite a budget reported at near $190 million, WWZ ultimately was considered a success with a $540 million global gross.

CAA brokered the Vampire’s Uprising movie deal and Dan Lazar of Writers House made the publishing sale."

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Little, Brown and Company Summary

"A virus that turns people into something somehow more than human quickly sweeps the world, upending society as we know it. This panoramic thriller begins with one small mystery. The body of a young woman found in an Arizona border town, presumed to be an illegal immigrant, walks out of the town morgue. To the young CDC investigator called in to consult the local police, it’s a bizarre medical mystery.

More bodies, dead of a mysterious disease that solidifies their blood, are brought to the morgue, and disappear. In a futile game of catch-up, the CDC, the FBI, and the US government must come to terms with what they’re too late to stop: an epidemic of vampirism that will sweep first the United States, and then the world.

Impossibly strong, smart, poised, beautiful, and commanding, these vampires reject the term as derogatory, preferring the euphemistic “gloamings.” They quickly rise to prominence in all aspects of modern society: sports, entertainment, and business. Soon people are begging to be ‘re-created,’ willing to accept the risk of death if their bodies can’t handle the transformation. The stakes change yet again when a charismatic and wealthy businessman, recently turned, decides to do what none of his kind has done before: run for political office.

This sweeping yet deeply intimate fictional oral history–told from the perspectives of several players on all sides of the titular vampire uprising–is a genre-bending, shocking, immersive and subversive debut that is as addictive as the power it describes."

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