Art from Warriors book series
Harry Potter producer David Heyman has been chosen to bring the fantasy series Warriors to the big screen, THRreports. Alibaba Pictures wills also produce the movie franchise based on children's books. It will be a co-production between China and the United Kingdom.
Warriors is a British book series focused on four clans of wild cats. The series is written by a team of writers under the pseudonym Erin Hunter. The main series is 36 novels in total and over 30 million copies have been sold.
Heyman says the first film will be an origin story, following a pet cat named Rusty who ends up joining a wild cat clan. "He's stigmatized, he's an outsider, he is not from the forest, he's lived in the comfort of a human home," Heyman said of the main character. "So it's about him getting acclimatized into this place, earning his place in spite of great prejudice against him and ultimately rising up."
Heyman says they will be using CGI characters to represent the cats and won't be doing motion capture of actual cats. "I think motion capture works best when there are humanoid characters — two arms, two legs," Heyman said. "If you're doing a cat, it doesn't work. What we'll do is to film actors for reference, like what we did in Paddington."
Heyman feels the film is universal enough that it could be in either English or Chinese. "The beauty of it is there are no humans walking around in the stories. What you have is you have cats. Cats are not specific to any country," he said. "Though I suspect it'd probably be set in a forest in the U.K., because the authors are British. We may use actors anywhere. It's too early to tell, but we're open to all possibilities."
Heyman certainly has experience with adapting children's fantasy, so it will be interesting to see where this goes. I love cats, but I've never heard of this series, so now I'm sort of interested in looking into it. What about you? Are there any Warrors fans? Are you ready for a movie?