Apple has made a deal to produce a TV series adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s famous Foundation trilogy, Deadline reports. The project is the brainchild of Skydance Television, which made a deal with the Asimov estate last June for the rights to develope a “sprawling series” based on the books, with David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman tagged as executive producers and showrunners. Goyer is co-writing the upcoming Terminator reboot and has worked on The Dark Knight, batman Begins, Ghost Rider, and the Blade franchise, and Friedman’s work includes Avatar 2, the War of the Worlds remake, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Deadline suggests that this latest deal signals an even higher level of ambition for Apple, following its morning show drama headlined by Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, a re-imagination of the Spielberg classic, Amazing Stories, along with a Ronald D. Moore space drama, a Damien Chazelle series, a Kristin Wiig comedy, and others.
Asimov’s classic trilogy is a genre-defining sci-fi saga that laid the foundation (no pun intended) for Star Wars and many other sci-fi films and TV series, and a great many writers have attempted to translate the original Foundation trilogy to the big screen with very limited success, finding it difficult to fit the sprawling saga into a feature film format. HBO even recently tried developing a series based on it with Interstellar co-writer and Westworld exec producer Jonathan Nolan, but it never resulted in an actual script order. If Apple and Skydance can pull this off, Foundation has the potential to become a flagship series for Apple’s Worldwide Video Content Team that could rival Game of Thrones.
