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Sam Raimi gets Terry Goodkind’s bestselling Sword of Truth adventure series!

Sam Raimi, best known as the director of the hugely successful SPIDER-MAN and SPIDER-MAN II films, and his producing partner Joshua Donen, have optioned film rights for Terry Goodkind’s enormously popular bestselling SWORD OF TRUTH adventure series, published by Tor Books.

Having been approached by Hollywood a number of times over the past decade, Goodkind was never convinced that his 400,000 word bestselling novels could be successfully compressed into worthwhile feature films. In a meeting at the author’s home, the renowned director and producer instead conceived of a groundbreaking mini-series. Within two hours Goodkind was sold on the concept and negotiations commenced. Ten months later the deal was finally concluded. “It’s a dream come true to work with someone of such remarkable vision, talent, and ability,” Goodkind said. “Given Sam’s sincere love for these stories and his determination to only make great films, this mini-series will be a watershed event.”

All of Goodkind’s novels have been international bestsellers. Translated into 20 foreign languages, there are over 10 million copies in print. The SWORD OF TRUTH series began with WIZARD’S FIRST RULE in 1994. The 10th novel in the series, PHANTOM, is on sale now. The 11th and final volume is under contract and will be published in 2008.

Raimi and Donen hope to begin production of the opening mini-series, WIZARD’S FIRST RULE, within the next year, to be followed by ensuing volumes of the epic novels. The development process will begin while Raimi completes SPIDER-MAN III. Definitive word on the production will be available in early 2007.

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You may have noticed in the press release that Sam Raimi said “produced with compelling, self-contained episodes.” The nature of TV syndication requires that each week’s episode be a story in itself, meaning that while the TV series will follow the background story of the book, it will not be able to follow the book exactly because there would be parts that would make an incomplete episode.

Therein lies the opportunity. The TV series, being visual, will actually require that we expand on the book in order to make each of these episodes work. Since each episode will have to be able to stand alone, some places will require additional material, so, as an example, we may incorporate some of the backstory into the show, showing, say, George Cypher going to get The Book of Counted Shadows. This means that the series will actually have more story content than the novel.