Shadow and Bone: Netflix To Adapt Grishaverse Book Series
In its ongoing bid for total media domination, Netflix is turning to one of the oldest kinds of media: books.
The streaming giant announced today that it would be adapting the Grisha fantasy trilogy. The Grisha trilogy comes from American author Leigh Bardugo and is made up of the novels Shadow and Bone (2012), Siege and Storm (2013), and Ruin and Rising (2014). Another novel, Six of Crows was released in 2015 and is set in the “Grisha-verse.” Netflix specifically mentioned Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows in their announcement as the books being adapted.
The as of yet unnamed Shadow and Bone series will be eight episodes and Netflix has brought out their creative big guns for it. Eric Heisserer (the writer of Netflix’s uber hit Bird Box) will produce the series and serve as showrunner. Shawn Levy via his 21 Laps imprint and Pouya Shahbazian will produce the series as well. Levy, who previously produced Netflix’s other uber hit Stranger Things, also produced Heisserer’s Oscar-nominated sci-fi film Arrival. Pouya Shahbazian has experience with fantasy books, having produced the Divergent series.
The amount of impressive in-house Netflix talent on Shadow and Bone could prove useful, as the story is pretty massive. The official logline reads:
In a world cleaved in two by a massive barrier of perpetual darkness, where unnatural creatures feast on human flesh, a young soldier uncovers a power that might finally unite her country. But as she struggles to hone her power, dangerous forces plot against her. Thugs, thieves, assassins and saints are at war now, and it will take more than magic to survive.
Bardugo modeled her fantasy world after the Russian Empire of the early 1800s, rightfully identifying Tsarist Russia as a prime template for a fantasy setting based around darkness.
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The Grishaverse books have sold 2.5 million copies in English and have been trasnlated into 38 languages. The story continues later this month with the publication of King of Scars.
The Grisha series was previously acquired by Harry Potter producer David Heyman via Dreamworks to be adapted into a film series in 2012 but clearly nothing has come of that. That’s all well and good, as Netflix seems to have a solid handle on this whole book adaptation thing anyway.
Alec Bojalad is TV Editor at Den of Geek and TCA member. Read more of his stuff here. Follow him at his creatively-named Twitter handle @alecbojalad
