Major deal that could see ALL of Phillip K. Dick's works adapted for film

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

$1 BILLION. Fabulous and extremely rewarding movies like Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall but also a couple of duds that made money like Paycheck and most recently the awful Nicolas Cage movie Next. Now just like Marvel and Stephen King, anything or any character that they have ever contributed to popular culture will eventually be made into film as studio's search deeper and deeper into their back catalogues to find their next blockbuster hit. In Phillip K. Dick's case, it might be sooner rather than later...

The Halcyon Co. has inked a three- year first-look deal for all the works by sci-fi scribe Philip K. Dick that have not previously been adapted. Renewable deal with Electric Shepherd Prods., a shingle run by two of the late author's daughters, follows Halcyon's May acquisition of the "Terminator" franchise. It allows them to develop adaptations for the bigscreen, smallscreen and other media platforms.

So the guys who are rushing ahead with the fourth installment of The Terminator to beat the June strike, now have free reign on the back catalogue of some 120 short stories and 45 novels (excluding the nine already adapted). It's a little bit exciting this deal as Dick's novels have such a great wealth and imagination to them that if you get the right kind of talented team together, it can turn out to be an awesome 2-3 hour of glorious cinema. According to Variety, the first novel they cited as being likely for adaptation was Ubrik...

Phillip K. Dick's novel from 1969 is actually set in the early 90's and had previously been in the hands of Dick's A Scanner Darkly producer Tommy Pallota who as recently as last summer cited the novel as one he wanted to make for the big screen. There was another famous tale of trying to bring this movie to the big screen in 1974 when French film-maker Jean-Pierre Gorin was set to direct the film from a screenplay that Dick was said to have written in ONE drug filled night, but it never got off the ground. The beginning of a massive long plot synopsis is below, but you can read the rest from Wiki...

The protagonist is Joe Chip, a debt-ridden technician for Glen Runciter's "prudence organization," which employs people with the ability to block certain psychic powers (for instance, an anti-telepath can prevent a telepath from reading a client's mind). Runciter runs the company with the assistance of his deceased wife Ella, who is kept in a state of "half-life," a form of cryonic suspension that gives the deceased person limited consciousness and communication ability.

The cryonic suspended state is similar to the idea used in Vanilla Sky and is said to deal with notions of reality and what it means to be real. A real exciting number of Dick adaptations on the horizon then but first thing's first though they need to make sure they get The Terminator right before we can trust the company with our excitement over what they are doing. But it does seem the newly formed studio want sci-fi adaptions to introduce themselves to Hollywood.