Anyone
who has grown up reading John Marsden's Tomorrow When the War Began book
series will no doubt have been waiting for this announcement for years.
Screen Australia this week announced the
financial backing for five new feature films including Stuart
Beattie's directorial debut with
Tomorrow When the War Began, The Australian reported.
It's the book series that has been screaming out to be made for years -
so it's exciting to hear that it's finally getting off the ground.
For those not in the know, The Tomorrow
Series was a series of invasion novels written by Aussie scribe John
Marsden, which detailed the invasion and occupation of Australia by a
foreign power.
The novels (told in first person perspective in the novels) follow a
teenage girl named Ellie Linton, who is part of a small band of
teenagers waging a guerrilla war on the enemy soldiers in their
fictional home town of Wirrawee.
Tomorrow,
When The War Began and its subsequent sequels are one of
the most popular series of novel in Australian literature history,
selling upwards of 2.5 million copies in Australia alone.
Stuart Beattie (who also wrote Tom Cruises' Collateral and was
behind turning Pirates
of the Caribbean
into a workable film) will take on directing duties, with Andrew Mason (The Matrix) set to
produce.
I remember reading this back in in the early 2000s / late 1990s - and
in my head
the lead character, Ellie, was always destined to be Brooke Satchwell
(who, at the time, was part of a hot onscreen couple in Neighbours - along
with House's
Jessie Spencer).
Now, realistically, the time for Satchwell to star has long since past
- but casting to this will be the key. At the very least, it's exciting
to hear a truely marketable and exciting Australian story will hit the
big screen.
But for every up - there is a down - and with the excitment of Tomorrow When the War Began
being announced, I am equally depressed to hgear that a sequel to Nick
Giannopoulos's The Wog
Boy (which made upwards of $11M at the Australian Box
Office) has also been given the go-ahead.
Wog
Boy 2 : Kings of Mykonos (shoot me now!!) follows
Steve "The Wog Boy" Karamitsis as he inherits a beach on the resort
island of Mykonos. And hear I thought the Australian film industry was
taking a step forward...
However, until the camera's get rolling - we've found a pretty nifty YouTube student film adaptation of the Tomorrow series... now imagine this with a budget!
