Blog in Exile: Hollywood News & Rumors, 6/11

Warner Brothers has bought the film rights to Terry Brooks's entire "Shannara" mega-series, with initial reports saying that the second book, The Elfstones of Shannara, is likely to be the first movie.

Orson Scott Card's recent novel Empire has been optioned for a movie by Warner Brothers under producer Joel Silver.

SciFi Wire takes on Stephen King adaptations:

• King is reportedly pleased by the upcoming movie 1408, based on his short story of the same name
• and Eli Roth, director of the vile but popular Hostel strips of exposed celluloid, is set to direct a movie a movie based on King's recent novel Cell.

SciFi Wire reports that Variety reports (without giving a link) that Bill Murray will star in an adaptation of Jeanne DuPrau's YA science fiction novel City of Ember. Now, I've read City of Ember, so I know the two main characters are young teenagers...so I'm wondering how badly this quite good book is going to be altered by Hollywood's Procrustean bed.

Updated, 12 June at 14:48 EDT: SciFi Wire found a way to tie its two Stephen King movie stories (see above) together -- with the news that Eli Roth, who will make the movie of Cell, was considered for the job of directing 1408 but rejected because his version of the story was too bloody for potential backers.