Anne Rice’s ‘The Tale Of The Body Thief’ Is Coming To The Big Screen

Great news, Anne Rice fans … an option to make a film of her novel The Tale of the Body Thief has been picked up by Imagine Entertainment (the production company of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer). Long time Rice fans will recall that Body Thief is the 4th book of her Vampire Chronicles series and features her beloved vampire hero Lestat de Lioncourt as the main protagonist. I’m a HUGE fan of The Vampire Chronicles and really love the novel The Tale of the Body Thief. But, while I am excited at the prospect of having Lestat make his return to the big screen, I am concerned about who might be cast in the lead role.

It must be a wonderful time to be Anne Rice. Not only is her return to supernatural fiction, The Wolf Gift, just a few days away from publication (look for it 2/14/12), but today comes news that The Tale of the Body Thief, Book IV of The Vampire Chronicles, is heading to the big screen! According to THR, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment has optioned the rights to Rice's The Tale of the Body Thief. Imagine used its partnership with India’s Reliance Big Entertainment to fund the acquisition, and it is using the Imagine Reliance Writers Lab to work on the script. Lee Patterson, who wrote a well-regarded screenplay titled Snatched, is working on Body Thief. Producing with Imagine are Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, and Karen Kehala-Sherwood, the Imagine exec who oversees the Lab, and the company's Erica Huggins are exec producing.

As you may recall, Tom Cruise played Lestat in the 1994 film Interview with the Vampire and Stuart Townsend played the role in the 2002 sequel film Queen of the Damned. Any successful Lestat film is completely reliant on the right casting. I’m not sure who I’d like to see in the role but it has to be someone, well, perfect. Alexander Skarsgaard comes to mind but I don’t know that he can play another vampire while he is still featured in the HBO series True Blood. The basic premise of Tale of the Body Thief is that after centuries as a vampire, Lestat decides to trade bodies with a human so that he can be reminded of what it is like to be mortal again. When the body theif doesn’t want to give back his body, Lestat must enlist the help of others to get his body back. I am cautiously optimistic that Body Thief will make a good film but, again, it all comes down to casting. Let’s wait and see who wins the role of Lestat in this new film before we really start celebrating.

Any Anne Rice fans in the hiz? If so, which of her Vampire Chronicles books are your faves?

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