Warner Options Brad Thor Spy Novels
This is sort of old news, but still relevant. Variety reports that Warner Bros., looking to get a spy franchise of their own off the ground, has picked up the rights to author Brad Thor's Scott Harvath series for producers Bill Gerber (Gran Torino) and Casey Wasserman. The deal also covers Thor's new novel, The Athena Project, which centers on a team of four elite female covert operatives. I haven't read any of these books (are they good?), but according to the trade, "the Harvath tomes center on a field agent who's a former Navy SEAL involved in counterterrorism ops in the world of underground intelligence."
Gerber told Variety that he's planning to develop Thor's 2002 novel The Lions of Lucerne first, as an origin story, adding, "We think that this could become something like the Jason Bourne franchise." I've got to say, I like the sound of it, judging from Amazon's plot description: "The story careers from the ski slopes of Utah to the top of Switzerland's Mount Pilatus and sets Scot on an impossible mission: recover the president, evade renegade Swiss spy Gerhard Miner and his cadre of trained agents, and elude the American conspirators who are hot on his trail."
