1. Snow Crash
After last year’s British sci-fi horror Attack The Block, Joe Cornish landed the directorial duties on the adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk trend-setter, Snow Crash.
Snow Crash is set in a near-future dystopian United States, where the federal government has vanished and instead a network of franchises, mercenaries, corporate entities and the mafia maintain control. The story follows Hiro Protagonist, a hacker who tries to stop the end of civilisation when a fatal pseudo-narcotic called Snow Crash threatens the human race. Masquerading as a computer virus, Snow Crash infects users who are plugged in to the Metaverse; Stephenson’s idea of a futuristic Internet merged with virtual reality similar to an MMO.
When published, Snow Crash sent a shockwave through the genre literary world and secured a spot on Time Magazine’s of the 100 all-time best English books written since 1923. Originally optioned in 1996, the film had director Jeffrey Nachmanoff attached for Touchstone Pictures. The project then collapsed under the weight of the material and was picked up by Disney but is now back at Touchstone under the production of Kennedy-Marshall. Producer and big fan of the novel, Kathleen Kennedy offered the script to Cornish, who then signed on.
The project has an absolute winner with securing Joe Cornish, a film and genre geek whose loyalty to detail and cheeky blink-and-you’ll-miss-them homages to some of sci-fi’s icons in Attack The Block, will hopefully be perpetuated in this cyber classic.
Snow Crash is currently in pre-production.
Are you looking forward to seeing any of these flicks after Cloud Atlas? Or can you think of other literary masterpieces you’d like to see on the big screen? Have your say in the comments below.
