Skydance, the studio that brought you Terminator: Genisys and the Mission: Impossible movie franchise, now plans to bring Neal Stephenson's Seveneves to the big screen. Ron Howard is attached to direct, with Apollo 13 collaborator Bill Broyles, Jr. handling the screenplay.
Published in 2015, Seveneves is a sweeping saga of humanity's struggle to survive throughout the millennia. After the moon explodes, humans flee the dying Earth to take up life in space. Five thousand years later, they've evolved into seven distinct races, and their numbers have swelled to 3 billion. They return to the Earth, a planet they believe to be dead, only to find that they aren't alone.
Stephenson's novel made an impression. Seveneves appeared on Bill Gates' summer reading list for 2016. It was nominated for the 2015 Goodreads Choice Award for Science Fiction, and is currently in the running for the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novel, alongside N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season and Naomi Novik's Uprooted.
That kind of attention isn't a first for Stephenson, whose novels and stories have won Hugo, Locus SF, and Clarke Awards. Still, this is an auspicious occasion. If the Seveneves film adaptation project comes to fruition, it will mark the first time one of Stephenson's novels has made it to the big screen.
