Look, everything about Tomi Adeyemi‘s debut YA fantasy novel Children of Blood and Bone screamed film adaptation. Fox 2000 had already acquired the film rights even before the novel was published in 2018, with a seven-figure deal with Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group that catapaulted the then-23-yr-old Adeyemi into literary super stardom, even though no one had read a single line from the book.
Not that it’d have been difficult to find a director to helm of the one biggest YA novels of our time, Fox 2000 has tapped Rick Famuyiwa, the director of films like The Wood, Brown Sugar and Dope. David Magee will be the script writer. Children of Blood and Bone was released as the first installment in a trilogy and, if you have read the book, follows the story of protagonist Zélie Adebola who, at six-years-old, watched the king’s guards hang her mother on a tree outside her home. The spine of the novel is held by magic, weaving African culture and mythology with fantastic world building. Some have described it as a Black lives Matter-inspired fantasy, in that Zélie matures in her magic and sets out to end the senseless violence and oppression by the lighter-skinned royal class.
Famuyiwa, who recently directed Kerry Washington as Anita Hill in the HBO film,Confirmation, is also directing episodes of the Star Wars series,The Mandalorian, for Disney+.
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