LOS ANGELES — Pierce Brown’s Red Rising novels have a film studio again, and this time they come with a director who has already built a dystopia for the screen. Paramount Pictures has picked up the film rights, the Hollywood Reporter said in an exclusive published Friday, with Francis Lawrence attached to direct an adaptation of the first book, also titled Red Rising.
Justin Rhodes, who worked with Lawrence developing Netflix’s BioShock adaptation, will write the script. Lawrence and Cameron MacConomy will produce for their about:blank banner alongside Francesco Goedhuis, and Brown will executive produce.
Lawrence is the marquee name. The report says he is no stranger to dystopian science fiction after his many installments of The Hunger Games franchise, and that he last directed the Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk. What the report does not carry is a budget, a cast, a start date or a release date, or any on-record comment from Paramount, Lawrence or Brown. For now this is rights, a director and a writer, not a production schedule.
The first book, as the Hollywood Reporter described it, blends Roman mythology with science fiction on a Mars where society runs on a color-coded class system, with the Golds on top. Darrow, a young miner and a Red, the lowest class and a people who exist to do hard labor, sees his love die, learns the truth about his existence and infiltrates Gold society intending to bring it down.
How many people already know that world is harder to say. Brown announced on Instagram in 2024 that the saga had sold more than 6 million copies, but the Hollywood Reporter noted it is unclear whether that figure covers the United States or the whole world. Six books have been published, with a seventh on the way, and Brown also wrote a prequel comic story published by Dynamite Entertainment.
The trade counts Red Rising among several literary properties in the works or on the way at Paramount. Children of Blood and Bone is finished and due Jan. 15, 2027, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is in production with Daisy Edgar-Jones among its stars, and The Midnight Library, with Florence Pugh in the lead, is due to shoot next year.
The books have been here before. The Hollywood Reporter says Red Rising was at one point set up for feature development at Universal and in the late 2010s was being eyed as a series. It does not say what became of either effort.
