Wolfgang Petersen Update

Ender's Game director, Wolfgang Petersen, is set to start filming a remake of The Poseidon Adventure for Warner Bros. Pictures starting in June. The movie is set to wrap in November.

Poseidon co-stars nine year old actor, Jimmy Bennett.

Hopefully there will be progress on Ender's Game after Petersen finishes up filming Poseidon.

Card to Meet with Petersen to Decide Fate of Ender's Game Movie

According to a scooper for AICN, Orson Scott Card confirmed the rumored expiration date for the deal with Warner Bros for the rights to Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow and said he'd have another meeting with director Wolfgang Petersen to decide if the movie is going to be made at all:

I sat in on an Orson Scott Card lecture this evening at the University of Missouri in Columbia. While he spent most of the lecture speaking on his theory that the stories passed down through generations has shaped our culture - which was interesting, he did manage to talk a lot about the status of the Ender's Game movie.

Apparently the studio option on the book runs out on December 7th and he has, what I would characterize as, a moderate hope that the movie will become a reality. He plans to sit down with Wolfgang Peterson after he squares away the Posideon Adventure and give his latest script idea, which he described as a combination of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, one final try. He said that if the deadline comes and goes then he will most likely end the attempt to bring the book to the big screen. Card was hopeful that the combination of the two books will work out the script problems in that the "buddy" movie approach would open up a practical way to reveal Ender's thoughts without any dreaded internal dialouge.

He sincierly seemed commited to coming up with a script that remained faithful to the original material - even if he doesn't write the script personally. Card said that the special effects would be revolutionary, ruling out wires or the Apollo 13 diving airplane technique, and that effects houses are lining up to get involved should the movie recieve the green light.

Next Up for Petersen?

Wolfgang Petersen told Scifi.com that the Ender's Game movie could be his next project:

We're getting the script in a few weeks, and if everything goes fine and that script goes in the right direction, it could indeed be my next one," Petersen said in an interview while promoting his upcoming upside-down cruise ship movie.

Petersen added that he anticipated having to audition at least 1,000 young actors to find the right person to play Card's boy genius, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, who is in training to defend Earth against an alien invasion in the late 21st century. But Petersen thinks Ender's Game could be as successful as the Harry Potter franchise. "I think Ender's was a little bit of an inspiration for Harry Potter," he said. "It could also be a great 3-D version of Ender's, with all that fighting in the battle stations."

Hopefully Petersen likes Orson Scott Card's latest version of the script and they can finally get the ball rolling!

Petersen Still Wants to Direct Ender's Game

Despite all of the problems facing the Ender's Game movie, Wolfgang Petersen is still interesting in directing it and told IGN that he believes that the movie will be made.

Last spring, Warner Bros placed the film into turnaround, essentially giving up on the project. Orson Scott Card said that he and the producers were shopping the script to other studios and that a director could not be hired until the financing had been arranged.

But now it looks like Petersen is still involved in the project.

He told IGN that he is working on developing three films, including Ender's Game, and that he had met with Orson Scott Card recently about it. He called it "a very, very tricky adaptation and an incredibly fascinating concept" and believes that he will some day make the film.