Enders Game gets Gavin Hood boost

X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Tsotsi director Gavin Hood is taking a pop at adapting adored 1985 sci-fi novel Ender’s Game for the big screen.

The novel, penned by Orson Scott Card, has had an adap wallowing in development hell for much of the past decade, with Neverending Story director Wolfgang Petersen attempting and failing to create his own film version.

The complicated plot and themes inherent to the story are no doubt to blame, with Ender’s Game following Ender, a young boy who is enlisted into a space-set Battle School where he is trained alongside other gifted children to become a military leader.

Featuring kids at war, a hyper-real setting and violent, aggressive war-game training, it’s obviously a project that has great potential – but is also presents plenty of hazards to filmmakers.

Hood is confident, though, having rewritten a script originally scribed by Card, and is aiming to direct the film himself.

Having worked with both kids and big action pics before, he seems a decent fit – let’s just hope his vision is more Tsotsi, less Wolverine.