According to a podcast from movie industry commentary series Hollywood Babble-On, as relayed by the JoBlo Movie Network, Clive Barker’s Imajica is to be adapted for television by Josh Boone, director of The Fault in Our Stars, who is also working on the TV adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. Interviewed by fellow director Kevin Smith, Boone states (13.00) that “I’m hard on literary adaptations, because I’ve been a big reader all my life, and so much of what I’m doing now is books,” and continues later on (1.31.00):
When I was a kid I loved this book, Imajica, and we’re going to do like a one-season TV mini-series of that novel… This incredible company – I love these guys – called MRC called me and said, ‘What do you want to do; we’ll option anything you want?’ and I said, ‘I want to do Imajica as a TV series,’ and they were like, ‘Let’s do it,’ and they went and made the deal and I was meeting Clive Barker a couple of weeks later – an incredible experience.
Clive Barker has cited Imajica as his favorite work: “It’s enormous, very fantastical, very sexual. It’s also very perverse. I suppose it’s inevitable that when you’ve just finished something you love it to death, but I really am very happy with it.” He’s spoken about it extensively, and an entire page on his website is devoted to his comments on the book. The current Kindle edition runs to 1196 pages, and the book’s incredibly complicated fictional world of five interconnected Dominions could practically stand as a paradigm for unfilmable, but a world that has learned to handle a film adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas by The Wachowskis is probably just about ready for an attempt on a televisual version of Imajica. Plus, Boone and Smith’s recurrent references to a “post-Walking Dead world” show how that series has changed the adaptation game – not into a post-zombie apocalyptic wasteland, but into an environment where major film and TV studios will countenance long multi-part epics without major set-pieces.
Boone concludes: “You know, there’s really nothing like Imajica on TV; it’s so out there that like there’s not really anything competing with it.” No shit.
I just finished this book, and while I like to consider myself to have a very imaginative and creative imagination, this book was a challenge for me. With the sheer scope, variations in setting, characters (species), intricate relationships, and so much more, at times I found myself struggling to correctly and justly construct a picture in my minds eye for everything that was going on. So obviously I reread it and slowly started to get a better grasp of the book as a whole. After my second time through I honestly thought there isn’t a single book out there more worthy of a movie adaptation. But after pondering on that for a while I realized the true essence of this book could never be portrayed in a movie even if it ran for 3 hours. I am so happy to hear that this mini-series is being made and will have more time to devote to all the intricacies that come along with this book. I just pray that the producer/director/network do this book the justice it deserves. I don’t know many other people that have read this book but I feel this series and the millions of people it reaches will show them the master craftsman that Clive Barker is and open their eyes to the world off Imajica.