In October 2010, Ender’s Game author, Orson Scott Card, gave a lecture at Christopher Newport University. During the questions and answers session afterward, Card announced that the director of the Ender’s Game movie would be Gavin Hood (director of X-Men Origins: Wolverine). He also told fans that he and the other producers are committed to making the movie,
“At least as good as the book, we hope better because [dramatic pause] it’ll be shorter! We have to cut out a lot. I mean I can tell you that the plan right now is Ender agrees to go to battle school there at home and the next thing we see is he’s walking in the door to Bonzo’s army and everything in between is there to read in the book. But we will cut straight to the chase because we have to get him out of Battle School halfway through this movie or we don’t have to make the ending work. That’s what we found out draft after draft. […] We’re not going to spend a lot of time in the battleroom. It’ll be great; It’ll look terrific. When you see it you go ‘Yes! That’s just how I hoped it would be! That’s- they did a wonderful job.’ And then you won’t have to look at it much because we’ll go on with the story, because it’s a human story. It’s not a sports story or even a military story. It’s about human relationships.”
You can watch the video of Card discussing the Ender’s Game movie below, it’s quite hilarious.
In January of this year, producer Roberto Orci annouced via his Twitter page “Ender’s Game! Us(K/O), Oddlot, and Gavin Hood taking his amazing script to the town! Who wants some ?” The tweet refers to the duo Alex Kurtzman /Roberto Orci (Star Trek, Transformers) and Oddlot Entertainment and Gavin Hood. The team is responsible for shopping the script around Hollywood studios.
In April , Orci had this to say about the zero-gravity training sequences that will appear in the movie, “We’re talking about shooting it every way you can: using tanks, using motion capture, using amazing acrobats, using an amazing space. But you have to have it, that’s part of the movie.” You can read more about it at io9.
Later in April, Summit Entertainment (Twilight) acquired the rights to the Ender’s game movie. Variety reported “K/O Paper Products, OddLot Entertainment and Digital Domain are production partners on the film, with Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman producing via their K/O Paper Products banner, Gigi Pritzker and Linda McDonough producing via OddLot Entertainment, along with Orson Scott Card and Lynn Hendee. Exec producers include OddLot’s Bill Lischak, K/O’s Mandy Safavi and Digital Domain’s Cliff Plumer and Ed Ulbrich.“
In May, Ender’s Game was a big seller for Sierra/Affinity at the Cannes film festival. Rights to distribute the Ender’s Game movie sold in most of the world. In Germany, Constantin Film snapped up German rights to Ender’s Game.
A Not-So-Brief Overview