“Covenant”, a short story by Elizabeth Bear, is set to be adapted by screenwriters Josh Campbell and Matt Suecken, who wrote the screenplay for 10 Cloverfield Lane. According to Deadline, the project will be produced by Arts District Entertainment and Spyglass VP Productions.
Bear’s story appeared in Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer’s 2014 anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (you can also read it online at Slate), an anthology about optimistic futures. Covenants follows a serial killer who’s been sentenced to “rightminding”—a procedure that alters their brain to feel empathy—and who suddenly finds herself hunted.
It’s not immediately clear what form the project will take: if it’ll be a series destined for a streaming TV service, or a bigger feature film.
Campbell and Suecken have been tapped to adapt science fiction before: They had been attached to an adaptation of Neal Shusterman’s novel Scythe in 2017, although they seem to have been replaced by The Magicians’ Sera Gamble since that initial announcement.
