With a keen eye open for a spiffy new potential franchise, Relativity has snapped up the rights to Realm, a new Young Adult dark fantasy pitch by director Scott Speer (Step Up 4: Miami Heat). Rebecca Sonnenshine (The Vampire Diaries) wrote the screenplay.
Speer sealed the deal with a proof-of-concept short film which you can watch above. The story revolves around Claire Daniels (played in the short by Adelaide Kane), a sort-of-exorcist in sort-of Matrix threads.
The slight twist in the set-up is that, while a traditional exorcism simply casts a demon out of the possessed to go elsewhere, Claire finishes the job and kills the supernatural bastards. She seems to do this by entering a coma-like state which gives her access to "the subconscious mind of the posessed, or the Realm of the Soul." Hence the name. So the Beckinsale PVC and leather is her subconscious avatar, while outside the realm she looks like a regular girl. But what is the Realm and why does she feel so at home there?
Claire in the short film comes over like a cross between John Constantine and Anita Blake, although we've not seen much or her personality outside the Realm yet: she's supposed to be less adept at handling personal demons than real ones. Relativity are thought to be viewing Realm as a potential new series along Underworld and Resident Evil lines.
John Swetnam, who's worked with Speer in the past on the Step Up films, Spinback, and MTV's Finding Carter, is producing. There's no start date yet.