Is Trevor Sands the new go-to guy for science-fiction movie adapations? He's written the screenplay for Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos and the Six Million Dollar Man movie. And now he's taking on Jeff Somers' The Electric Church.
Somers' The Electric Church, the first volume in a series, seems like a slam-dunk cool concept for a movie: it's got religion, weirdness, dystopian futures and noir. The books follow Avery Cates, a bodyguard/assassin who sometimes works for the police force of the council which oversees this future Earth's federation of nations. In the first book, Cates is forced to kill the head of a church that converts people by transplanting their brains into more easily controlled religious bodies. The film is tentatively called The Avery Cates Project.
Sands is writing the screenplay, but there's no director or star attached yet. It's being produced for Sony by Mosaic's Jimmy Miller, who's mostly produced comedies so far.
Meanwhile, what happened to Hyperion Cantos, whose script Sands also wrote? That film actually had a director announced almost exactly a year ago — Scott Derrickson, who gave us The Day The Earth Stood Still. And since then, no news. At least the new write-up of Electric Church mentions Hyperion as still in the pipeline, with Derrickson still attached. (Update: Apparently Derrickson is also signed up to direct a remake of a Danish supernatural thriller, as of a few months ago. So Hyperion is probably on the back burner.)
