Harry Potter is over and The Hobbit franchise wraps up this fall, so Warner Bros. is on the lookout for its next fantasy franchise. That might just be Dragonriders of Pern, which the studio optioned this week.
Dragonriders comes from the mind of Anne McCaffrey, who has written 22 books in the series. That means that there is a lot of material for Warner Bros. to mine if the first film is a hit. According to Deadline, the stories center on a group of dragonriders who have to save the planet of Pern from a deadly phenomenon known as Thread. As Entertainment Weekly points out, the first book was published in 1968 and continued up to 2012.
Deadline notes that the brains behind bringing the project to the studio is executive Drew Crevello, who worked on X-Men while he was at Fox. Julia Spiro has also been assigned to it.
Warner Bros. will soon be desperate for another fantasy franchise, as there’s no way for Peter Jackson to get a seventh film out of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books. (Although, we wouldn’t be surprised if he could.) The studio recently saw Harry Potter end, but J.K. Rowling is working on the new Fantastic Beats and Where To Find Them project.