Summit Entertainment Acquires Rights for Ender's Games Movie

Deadline reports that Summit Entertainment, the folks who bought us the Twilight films, have acquired the US rights for Ender's Games. Gavin Hood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) is set to direct his script.

According to Deadline:

The film will be shopped at the upcoming 2011 Cannes Film Festival, with Nick Meyer's Sierra/Affinity brokering offshore deals. The plan is to put the film into production by early next year.

I'm glad to see that the movie is moving forward, but I'm a little hesitant to be enthusiastic at this point with the personnel involved. I want to see Ender's Game done well. So, I hope that this is the right team to make the movie that deserves to be made, not a movie company desperately searching for some Harry Potter/Twilight property to make money off of.

I wasn't impressed with what Gavin Hood did with the Wolverine movie, so I have reservations about how he will be able to transfer something like Ender's Game to the big screen, especially since the darkness of Wolverine' character was whitewashed in the Origins movie and it had a sort of "this is a stupid comic book movie" attitude that implied that it wasn't being taken seriously.

Deadline refers to Ender's Game as "youth-driven series", so hopefully the potential of Summit wanting to turn Ender's Game into a teen Twilight series aging up the characters to teens played by 20-somethings won't happy. But you wonder if Summit is the type of company willing to make a movie with young kids involved in extreme violence.