According to Variety, Walden Media and Big Beach have acquired the rights to the upcoming film adaptation of The Last Animal, based on Ramona Ausubel’s bestselling 2023 novel.
Before I Fall filmmaker Ry Russo-Young has also signed on to direct the project, which centers around two sisters who discover a 4000-year-old baby mammoth during their mother’s scientific expedition. This marks Russo-Young’s first feature directorial project in a long while, after 2019’s coming-of-age romance film The Sun Is Also a Star.
What is The Last Animal novel about?
The official book synopsis of The Last Animal reads: “Teenage sisters Eve and Vera never imagined their summer vacation would be spent in the Arctic, tagging along on their mother’s scientific expedition. But there’s a lot about their lives lately that hasn’t been going as planned, and truth be told, their single mother might not be so happy either.
Now in Siberia with a bunch of serious biologists, Eve and Vera are just bored enough to cause trouble. Fooling around in the permafrost, they accidentally discover a perfectly preserved, four-thousand-year-old baby mammoth, and things finally start to get interesting. The discovery sets off a surprising chain of events, leading mother and daughters to go rogue, pinging from the slopes of Siberia to the shores of Iceland to an exotic animal farm in Italy, and resulting in the birth of a creature that could change the world—or at least this family.”
