Lionsgate To Kickstart Third Young Adult Franchise With Blackbird

On the whole, Lionsgate has fared pretty well from the young adult genre. It scooped up two of the biggest book series’ for 12 to 18-year olds and successfully translated them into blockbuster franchises. Now, the studio behind The Hunger Games and The Twilight Saga – on which they collaborated with Summit Entertainment – looks poised to dip back into that same pool for its next project Blackbird.

The movie takes its name from the first novel in a trilogy (because young adult books simply won’t land publishers now if there aren’t another two to follow) by author Anna Carey. Blackbird follows a young girl who wakes one day on a train track with no memory of how she came to be there. Apart from the rising dread in the pit of her stomach, she’s also in possession of $1,000, a tattoo of a blackbird on her wrist, a code, a backpack of clothes and a note forbidding her from calling the cops.

Lionsgate is eyeing up a prospective scribe despite the early stage of negotiations. That writer is Danny Mackey, who previously adapted School Of Fear and also has comedy pilot Jackass Of All Trades, cooking up at TBS with writing partner Seth Fisher and executive producer John Krasinski. If he’s successful, along with the studio, he could be ushering a brand new level of YA-mania to the multiplex.

Until any more developments arise on Lionsgate’s bid for Blackbird, have a read of the synopsis from Carey’s novel before the whole world goes bird crazy.

A girl wakes up on the train tracks, a subway car barreling down on her. With only minutes to react, she hunches down and the train speeds over her. She doesn’t remember her name, where she is, or how she got there. She has a tattoo on the inside of her right wrist of a blackbird inside a box, letters and numbers printed just below: FNV02198. There is only one thing she knows for sure: people are trying to kill her. On the run for her life, she tries to untangle who she is and what happened to the girl she used to be. Nothing and no one are what they appear to be. But the truth is more disturbing than she ever imagined.