Everything about this story is great news. ‘Artemis Fowl,’ a brilliant young-adult series by the hilarious Irish author Eoin Colfer, is set to have its first installment developed for the big screen with Walt Disney Studios and producer Harvey Weinstein. Michael Goldenberg (‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’) is currently penning the screenplay, and Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal are attached as executive producers.
If you loved ‘Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog‘ for its lovably evil criminal-mastermind protagonist but think you can do without all the rocking back and forth in the corner, sobbing hysterically at the ending, and rather want to share your twisted “sometimes it’s good to be bad” perversions with the whole family, then ‘Artemis Fowl’ is the series for you.
The titular character is an evil genius who’s also a millionaire. With the help of his enormous bodyguard, Butler, Artemis would be right at home fending off some James Bond incarnation, but instead the 12-year-old spends his free time decoding an ancient Fairy Holy Text written in Gnommish, never meant to be seen by humans. As a result of his findings, he kidnaps Fairy Captain Holly Short, the only female captain in the covert LEPrecon (get it?) organization. The ancient text confirmed that if you capture a fairy, you get its gold, and with his mother driven mad by the loss of her husband, young Artemis needs all the gold he can get to save his family.
With a cast of interesting characters, a heartwarming story, and smart jokes for the whole family, Walt Disney Studios feels like the perfect home for this series, and I couldn’t be more excited. There haven’t been any release-date estimates with script and casting still in the works, but pending any production disasters (please at least cast an Irish actor as Artemis!) I’d say this is a film to keep an eye out for.
Source: Coming Soon
