David Farnor | On 30, Sep 2017

Joe Cornish’s long-awaited adaptation of Snow Crash is leading a trio of new original series for Amazon Prime Video.

The Attack the Block director has been attached to Neal Stephenson’s novel for several years now, but what was once set to be a feature film has found a new home on the small screen, with Amazon Studios joining with Paramount TV for the project. A sci-fi classic, the book follows Hiro Protagonist in a dystopian future America, who comes across a computer virus that is striking down hackers – and so he begins a search for the mysterious threat.

Cornish is executive producing the show alongside Frank Marshall, whose Kennedy Marshall Company is also on board.

It’s one of several new genre projects in development at Amazon Studios, which is currently looking to scale up its original output to produce big-hitting shows that can make a larger splash with viewers. In the last month, it’s signed an overall deal with Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, The Walking Dead’s Robert Kirkman and Stranger Things writer and producer Justin Doble.

The next in its new slate is Ringworld, a co-production with MGM, which is based on Larry Niven’s sci-fi novels. The book follows Louis Gridley Wu, a 200-year-old man who lives on a technologically advanced future Earth. Offered a place on a voyage to explore Ringworld, the artificial ring beyond Known Space, their journey spans three books of thrilling new discoveries.

Syfy previously had a miniseries based on the books in development, with William S. Todman Jr. and Edward Milstein on board as exec producers – a project that, coincidentally, was part of the same 2013 Syfy slate that once included The Man in the High Castle, which ended up in production at Amazon Studios instead.

The third new project is Lazarus, the comic book by Greg Rucka (Jessica Jones). Rucka is adapting the book himself for the screen, telling the story of an alternative near-future, where the world has been divided between 16 familes, who run their rival territories in a feudal system. The title comes from the name used for the tool employed by each to quell uprisings: a one-person kill squad. Ruck is exec-producing alongside Michael Lark (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and Angela Cheng Caplan.

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