Legendary Entertainment has acquired the film, television, and ancillary rights to Paolo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist and will steer the feature film development of the project with Sony’s TriStar Pictures and Palmstar.
Jack Thorne, who adapted the family hit Wonder, and Netflix’s Enola Holmes, is attached to write.
The Alchemist tells the story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy, who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way are pieces of wisdom which encourage those who find them to listen to their hearts, read the omens strewn along life’s path and follow their dreams. Originally written in Portuguese in 1988, Coelho’s novel became an international bestseller, and holds the record for the most translated work by a living author. The title has won several literary awards including the Grand Prix Litteraire Elle, the Nielsen Gold Book Award, and the Corine International Award for fiction.
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TriStar Pictures will distribute the film worldwide as part of Legendary’s distribution partnership announced last year with the studio.
Thorne is a BAFTA and Tony Award-winning British screenwriter and theatre writer. He has also won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award for Outstanding Contribution to Writing and the Royal Television Society’s award for Outstanding Contribution to British Television. His TV credits include His Dark Materials and National Treasure, as well as the Netflix movie The Swimmers and the plays, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and The Motive and the Cue. Thorne is repped by UTA and Sloane, Offer, Weber & Dern, as well as Casarotto Ramsay & Associates in the UK.
The Alchemist has had a long and winding road to the big screen. As Deadline first told you, the project has been at TriStar with Palmstar Media’s Kevin Frakes since September 2016, previously guided creatively for years by Cinema Gypsy’s Laurence Fishburne. Frakes and Buddy Patrick spent $6.5 million at TIFF 2016, as we also reported, to acquire the novel from The Weinstein Company. That meant paying back TWC the $5 million it invested in book rights and script drafts before the studio put the book in turnaround, and another $1.5 million in producing fees against potential back end for the Weinstein Company. For a commitment by an independent producer/financier, The Alchemist deal rivaled the $5 million that upstart Imperative Entertainment paid for the David Grann novel Killers Of The Flower Moon, which is finally being released as a movie from Apple and Paramount on Oct. 20.
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