Author Ben Mezrich is no stranger to finding a cool story and seeing it become a movie. He wrote the books that got turned into The Social Network and 21, and now his upcoming work has already been picked up by Hollywood. It’s about the potential return of the woolly mammoth.
Mezrich’s upcoming book is called Woolly: The True Story of the De-Extinction of One of History’s Most Iconic Creatures. It’ll be published next fall by Simon & Schuster, but Fox and Temple Hill have already picked up the film rights.
While we don’t know what the movie will entail, the book is about geneticist George Church at Harvard University. In 2015, he successfully extracted DNA from an extinct woolly mammoth and fused it with an elephant. We covered it at the time, so read much more about the real life inspiration here.
https://gizmodo.com/scientists-have-transplanted-mammoth-dna-into-elephant-1693089895
Considering Temple Hill has made movies like The Maze Runner and The Fault in Our Stars, you can imagine the factual basis of Mezrich’s book is probably going to be used and exaggerated for dramatic purposes. Deadline went so far to ask if this could be the next Jurassic Park. That seems like a stretch, but, we’re all about any movie featuring woolly mammoths.
[Deadline]
