The Warded Man, the first in a sci-fi horror novel series by Peter V. Brett, is getting developed for television by the producers who brought us The Magnificent Seven and The Hustle.
According to Deadline, Roger Birnbaum and Mark Kinsey are developing the project via their company, Electromagnetic Productions. It appears to be their first foray into creating an on-screen Warded Man universe, with the goal to create a long-term franchise based on the five novels in Brett’s Demon Cycle series.
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The Warded Man
The Warded Man, which goes by the title The Painted Man in the UK, takes place in the far future where murderous demons called corelings rise at night and kill any human they come across. This battle has waged for centuries, with humans using magical wards they don’t fully understand to protect themselves. Whereas the first book in Brett’s series focuses on three young individuals, the Deadline description for the television adaptation mentions one man who has tattooed his entire body “with the lost battle wards to teach humanity how to fight back from the verge of extinction.”
This isn’t the first time Hollywood has considered adapting The Warded Man. In 2016, the book was optioned for a movie with some of the same producers on board. That effort apparently fizzled out, but it looks like a television adaptation has arisen out of the ashes of the former project.
Other producers on the small-screen adaptation include Remarkable Media’s Spike Seldin (The A-Team) and Kearie Peak (Leverage, The Librarian series) as well as Reality Distortion Field’s Simon Barry (Warrior Nun, Continuum) and Stephen Hegyes (Warrior Nun, Fifty Dead Men Walking). Barry is also on board as an executive producer and showrunner, with JD Zeik (Witchblade, Ronin) writing the screenplay.
The project is still in its very early days, so the adaptation has yet to announce any casting, or even what network or streaming platform we’ll eventually be able to watch the show on.
