Source: Now Playing Magazine
Original Story by: Scott Collura
Screenwriter Ehren Krueger (Brothers Grimm and The Skeleton Key) is currently working on “John Carter of Mars;” a screen adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs story.
“I’m in the writing process for ‘John Carter of Mars,’ working with director Kerry Conrad,” says Krueger. “He’s in too, with his visual design team – the effects, and the sort of outlandish worlds that need to be created for that. He has to design all that. So we’re pretty [well] along with the script. It’s a faithful adaptation to the novels, but the novels were written in the teens and 20’s, so there’s some degree of modernization just to the tone of them. But in terms of the story, we are trying to be as faithful as we can because those novels inspired a lot of science fiction and fantasy that came later in the century.”
Kerry Conrad is most noted for his directorial effort on “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.”
According to the IMDb Movie Database the status of “John Carter of Mars” is listed as Pre-Production. The plot can be summarized as: Civil War vet John Carter is transplanted to Mars, where he discovers a lush, wildly diverse planet whose main inhabitants are 12-foot tall green barbarians. Finding himself a prisoner of these creatures, he escapes, only to encounter Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, who is in desperate need of a savior.
Knowing all that we do today about Mars in the real world, it will be interesting to see how Krueger adapts the storyline to a more scientifically aware audience while keeping it as true to Burroughs’ original concept as possible.
Release date, at this time, is sometime in 2006.