Peter Jackson has had a busy old 2009 between The Lovely Bones, shepherding District 9, co-writing **The Hobbit **and overseeing Tintin. But now he's started to look again at future projects and has pulled out dragon adventure Temeraire as a possibility for his next project.
Ain't It Cool chatted with the man, and he revealed that the adaptation of Naomi Novik's book series, which reimagines the Napoleonic wars with dragons, could finally be making its way to a screen - just not necessarily the cinema.
Jackson nabbed the rights to Novik's swashbuckling novels (five are currently on the shelves and the director says she's planning nine in total) back in 2006 and since then he's been slowly developing the stories and commissioning design work.
But as he's started to think about making them work on screen, his feelings have shifted from a film series to a miniseries.
"I can't see any degree of common sense in trying to mount them one at a time as feature films. To me the stories, having read the first ones, already work as this continuing, on-going saga, so I'm thinking 'Is there a marketplace out there yet for a large budget mini-series?'
"I guess you'd think of things like HBO and you'd think of B****and Of Brothers and that sort of thing, but it'd be different than that. I'm thinking is there actually a market out there that'd give us the budget to do this properly and allow us to shoot this as a six, seven or eight part series where we have freedom, we have great production values and are able to tackle it as the epic saga that it deserves."
Sounds good to us, though of course it's still early days and Jackson may yet change his mind on the matter. But having devoured all five of the books so far, we're eager for this one to finally fly on to whatever screen he chooses to use...