EXCLUSIVE: After Christopher Nolan turned Homer’s ancient poem into gold with The Odyssey, maybe Hollywood is ready to take more chances on literate period fare. How else to explain the high level of interest when CAA and Kaplan Perrone went out with the spec script The Ballad of the Ember Knight, a 14th century-set drama that clocked in at 190 pages? When the dust settled, Sony paid near seven-figures to the sibling writing team Kieran and Brennan O’Dea. It is the first time they sold a script.
Ember Knight is a medieval epic set against the French and English conflict during the Hundred Years’ War. The hero is a legendary warrior accused of murdering the royal family. To reclaim his standing, he must protect the kingdom’s last surviving prince from the conspiracy that threatens them both. Sony’s Brittany Morrissey and Peter Kang brought it into the studio, and it came without producer attachments.
Related Stories
How did this become the talk of town at a time when the material market goes into summer slumber? It started with Kaplan/Perrone, which was asked to read the script, knowing full well it would be a hard sell given its length. They flipped for it, CAA got into it, and they took it out.
Watch on Deadline
While there was flirtation with doing Ember as a longform TV effort because of its length and sweep, the scribes didn’t want to go that route. Nor did they want to cut their work down to the usual length of around 112 pages for a feature script. Sony moved quickly.
Who are the O’Dea brothers? They are the middle sons of astronomers. Originally from the East Coast, they grew up in Baltimore and then Rochester before moving to northern Idaho after college. Their storytelling passion was fueled by their late grandfather, who would tell them as bedtime stories works like The Iliad, The Odyssey, Macbeth, WWII, and an errant knight named Sir Kay. It is comforting to know there is still a place for the classics in Hollywood.
The brothers are repped by CAA and Kaplan Perrone.
The plot of this script is as generic as any story found in the historical drama/medieval period action-adventure section of any bookshop. The difference is those books already have a fan base and following. Sony could have acquired the rights to any of those books and adapted it into a screenplay for much less than a million dollars, and they would have had at least some guarantee of a return on their investment. As it is, this script has zero
audience and already a million in development costs. How will they market this movie? And don’t tell me an A-list attachment will solve that problem, as we have seen numerous times you can’t bait an audience with star power. I can only assume Sony wanted a franchise of their own, like
Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Star Wars. If that’s true, why not just spend a few bucks
for the rights to a book that already has an audience. Good luck with this Sony. You will need it.
I really am curious what the real story is here.
Me too.
Oh god. When will execs start going to work in a meaningul way again? I mean they can’t all be fired and get producer deals. Can they? If so, how fast can we make that happen?
I read this script. It wasn’t anything special, your basic overly literary and pretentiously dense period piece. Well written and interesting, but around page 90 I started asking myself when the movie was going to start.
Okay, but Sony clearly thought it was special.
I’ll take Things That Didn’t Happen for $500, Alex.
Man, those 180 pages sure made Sony’s AI tired. God knows development execs don’t read anymore. Good for them.
Something tells me AI was involved in more than just the *reading* of this script.