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Warner Bros, Plan B Acquire Upcoming Edward Ashton Sci-Fi Novel ‘Mickey7’
EXCLUSIVE: In an early buy for recently arrived producer Plan B Entertainment, Warner Bros has acquired Mickey7, a science fiction novel by Edward Ashton that will be published in 2021. Run by Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, Plan B will produce.
UK rights to the book have been acquired by Solaris, and the U.S. rights are in play right now. Novel was pitched around Hollywood as The Martian meets Children of Time. The title character is an “expendable,” a person on missions who is sent on the most dangerous, even suicidal jobs. When an expendable dies, a new body is regenerated with most of the memories intact. Essentially, Mickey7 is the seventh iteration of an expendable who is undergoing an existential identity crisis while trying to keep his successor’s regeneration a secret and negotiating with the planet’s native species on a dangerous trip to colonize a new ice world.
On the publishing side, Michael Rowley at Solaris acquired the book at auction. The movie deal was brokered by Hotchkiss Daily & Associates on behalf of Paul Lucas at Janklow & Nesbit.
Plan B, the tastemaker producer behind Oscar winners Moonlight, 12 Years a Slave and The Big Short, and blockbusters like World War Z, recently moved to Warner Bros after a first-look film deal with Annapurna went by the wayside.