Michael Crichton is one of the authors with the best track records of being adapted successfully to movies and television, from Andromeda Strain to Jurassic World. So it makes sense that super-agency ICM has signed a deal to develop his work, especially previously unfilmed works. But what's left to adapt?
Image via Maverik Education
According to the Deadline article, ICM "will handle the majority of the titles — a couple are currently tied up — working closely with Crichton's widow Sherri Crichton and licensees of rights. There also will be a focus on unknown and unpublished works as well as the exploitation of books and other material that have not yet been adapted to the screen."
But given that two unfinished or unpublished Crichton books have already been published after his death, and everything he published under his crime-author pseudonym John Lange has been getting shiny new editions, it's hard to say how much unpublished material might remain. Meanwhile, of the books Crichton published during his lifetime, there's not a huge list of material to choose from.
Binary was an early novel (under the Lange pseudonym) that dealt with an assassin who combines two harmless chemicals to create a deadly nerve agent — although Crichton himself adapted it into a TV movie. Airframe is a book about an airplane that has an accident in mid-air, because a safety mechanism went sort of wrong. Prey is another one of Crichton's "beware of science gone mad" novels, this time dealing with nanotechnology — Fox optioned it years ago, but that's probably lapsed. Next, Crichton's final novel, is a cautionary tale about genetic engineering. Then there's Micro, posthumously completed by Richard Preston, in which people get shrunk to tiny size.
But what would be hilarious (and by hilarious, I mean horrifying) is if somebody decided to try and make a movie of State of Fear, Crichton's ecoterrorism novel that expounds his view that human-made climate change is a hoax.
Which previously unfilmed Crichton book do you think would make a good movie? Or is there a book that already got filmed, which is ripe for a new interpretation? I'm kind of jazzed about the idea of a brand new Terminal Man movie, to be honest.