By The Passage is the first book in one of two different “vampires engineer the apocalypse” book trilogies floating about right now. The other is co-written by Guillermo del Toro, and it kinda sucks. The Passage, however, was my favorite book from last year. The inevitable adaptation was set to be directed by Ridley Scott, with a script from John Logan already written. Now, for as of yet unknown reasons, Scott has bowed out of the project, to be replaced by Cloverfield and Let Me In director Matt Reeves. This conflicts with Reeves’s other two in-development projects, Cloverfield 2 and an adaptation of 8 O’Clock in the Morning. It’s expected that The Passage will be done first, as a script has already been written, where the other two are only in a conceptual phase.
I’m a big fan of The Passage, so news of an adaptation is pretty exciting. That said, Ridley Scott is certainly the more talented filmmaker of the two, so I’m sad to see him leave. However, I have hope that Matt Reeves can make a Passage I can be happy for. I’m including the more detailed synopsis of The Passage below the cut, so have a gander, and tell me which one you’d rather see tackling the source material.
[Via /Film]When a secret project to create a super-soldier backfires, a virus leads to a plague of vampiric revenants that wipes out most of the population. One of the few bands of survivors is the Colony, a FEMA-established island of safety bunkered behind massive banks of lights that repel the virals, or dracs—but a small group realizes that the aging technological defenses will soon fail. When members of the Colony find a young girl, Amy, living outside their enclave, they realize that Amy shares the virals’ agelessness, but not the virals’ mindless hunger, and they embark on a search to find answers to her condition.