You don’t go to Francis Lawrence for depictions of happy societies; as the director of The Long Walk, I Am Legend, four Hunger Games movies, and a whole host of music videos that ask hair-raising questions like “What if the Black-Eyed Peas were real?” Lawrence has made a name for himself depicting various visions of fucked-up worlds. Now he’s found a new one to bum us all out with, having latched on to a bestselling dystopian series set on Mars—Pierce Brown’s Red Rising books—as the next dystopia he intends to bring to the screen.
This is per THR, which reports that Lawrence has been attached to direct Paramount’s adaptation of the first of Brown’s books (also called Red Rising), from a script by Justin Rhodes. The books, it feels worth pointing out—despite not being marketed as YA—bear a lot of surface similarities to the Suzanne Collins novels that Lawrence is intimately familiar with, including featuring strict class delineations that keep an oppressed underclass at the mercy of rich and privileged elites, a structure built around a high-stakes killing game, and, on a more surface level, a whole bunch of picking your way through names cribbed from Roman society and mythology. The books’ initial narrative, including the first book being adapted by Lawrence here, center on Darrow, a member of Mars’ “Red” underclass, who eventually infiltrates the high society of the planet’s “Gold” rulers, threatening to Mockingjay the whole system to the ground.
Of course, before he can get his ass to Mars, Lawrence does have a whole other Hunger Games movie to get through, first; the director—who’s directed every installment of the massively successful/miserable franchise aside from the very first one—has prequel film Sunrise On The Reaping coming out November 20, 2027.
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