Columbia Pictures has acquired the rights to Geoff Rodkey’s sci-fi middle-grade novel We’re Not From Here from Will Gluck’s Olive Bridge Entertainment and has landed Mike Mitchell (The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part) to helm a film adaptation of the project, according to Deadline.
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First published in 2019 by Crown Books, the New York Times bestselling novel follows a family of humans who has been living on a station on Mars after the destruction of Earth who decide to immigrate to an alien planet named Choom, where they find themselves struggling to adjust to life amongst the native race known as the Zhuri, who aren’t a fan of humankind and don’t like singing, comedy or any kind of emotion.
The film version, which will be adapted by Rodkey, will be a family-focused adventure blending live-action and animation, a venture Mitchell previously underwent in the critically tarnished Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked and The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: Sponge Out of Water, on which he helmed the film’s live-action sequences.
Pick up the original novel here!
Gluck, who will produce the adaptation alongside Olive Bridge’s Jodi Hildebrand, has had a long-standing working relationship with Sony Pictures and their TV branch, delivering hits including 2009’s Fired Up!, 2010’s Easy A, 2011’s Friends with Benefits and 2018’s Peter Rabbit for the former while producing and co-creating The Michael J. Fox Show and The McCarthys in association with Sony TV.
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In addition to being a New York Times bestselling author, Rodkey is well-known as an Emmy-nominated screenwriter of films and TV including Daddy Day Care, Politically Incorrect, RV, The Shaggy Dog and Good Luck Charlie, It’s Christmas!. His next novel, the suburban-apocalypse focused Lights Out in Lincolnwood, is set to hit shelves in summer 2021.
After making his directorial debut on the 1999 Rob Schneider-led comedy Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigalo and following it up with the holiday failure Surviving Christmas and Disney superhero hit Sky High, Mitchell would go on to focus on more animated fare with behind-the-scenes work at DreamWorks Animation on the Kung Fu Panda trilogy, Shrek franchise and Monsters vs. Aliens. His most recent works include the Oscar-nominated Trolls and The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part.
