'Lord of the Rings' Team is Doing a 'Mortal Engines' Movie

Official Mortal Engines art

Director Peter Jackson and much of the team behind the Lord of the Rings film trilogy are doing a new movie adaptation, Variety reports. Their latest project is a film adaptation of the Philip Reeve novel Mortal Engines. A series of films is planned.

Mortal Engines is set thousands of years in Earth's future. Earth's resources have dwindled and most people live in mobil mechanical cities that fight each other for resources. 15-year-old protagonist Tom Natsworthy encounters a intriguing young woman from the Outlands who changes everything.

Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens will be co-writing the movie. Christian Rivers will be the director. Rivers has worked with Jackson for a long time. Notably, he surpervised visual effects and acted a splinter director for The Hobbit movies.

"Christian is one of my closest collaborators. The combination of emotion and jaw-dropping visuals in Mortal Engines makes this the perfect movie for his move into feature directing," Peter Jackson said of Rivers. "What Christian intends to do with Philip Reeve's terrific story is going to result in an original and spectacular movie. I wish I could see it tomorrow!"

Filming is set to begin in New Zealand in spring 2017. Universal Pictures will be distributing the film. The Mortal Engines series is four books are in total and there are plans to adapt all of them.

The project sounds interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing how Rivers does as a director. What about you? Does this sound like something you want to see?

Read: Peter Jackson's Brutal Response To Jake Gyllenhaal's Horrible Lord of the Rings Audition