Studio's splash out seven figure deal for vampire trilogy The Passage

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

28 Weeks Later making any money, and even that didn't set the world a light to start this kind of movement. Variety report that Fox 2000 and Scott Free have splashed out a seven figure deal to bring Jordan Ainsley's bloodsucking series The Passage to the big screen, apparently beating off competition from several other studio's.

When terminally ill cancer patients get healthy after being bitten by bats in South America, the government conducts secret tests with human subjects to see if a virus can cure illness. Instead, it unleashes a swarm of bloodthirsty vampires out of the test subjects, which include death row inmates.

Ridley Scott is said to have a great interest in the project and it was him that pushed through Scott Free's part of the producing deal so it could turn out that he directs the flick when it eventually gets made. The first book in the series (which is described as 28 Weeks Later meets The Stand) doesn't even come out till early 2009, so it might be quite a wait until we see this on our movie screens. Deals like this happen all the time for upcoming books but this one in particular is newsworthy simply for the amount of money spent on it.