Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Sony Pictures has acquired a pitch from scribe Jason Keller for a period origin story on the Dracula mythology that will be produced by Joe Roth and Palak Patel. I’m hearing the deal was high six-figures against seven-figures. It becomes the latest in a growing list of films about the iconic vampire borne out of the legend of Vlad the Impaler.

There is also a new version of Dracula Year Zero that has risen from the grave with Gary Shore directing, Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless writing and Moneyball‘s Mike De Luca producing. There is also an apocalyptic contemporary project coagulating that’s based on the book trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan that concluded with the recently released The Night Eternal, which del Toro will set up when he completes Pacific Rim. And Keller himself is attached to another contemporary vampire film, adapting the Justin Cronin novel The Passage for Matt Reeves, in which government experiments on terminally ill people launches a plague of vampires.

Insiders at Sony would only say the intention is to launch a period franchise. The deal brings together the combatants in the race to launch a Snow White film. Keller most recently scripted Relativity Media’s Mirror Mirror, and Roth and Patel produced Snow White And The Huntsman for Universal. Roth has been revived as a producer making iconic properties in the public domain. Aside from Alice In Wonderland and Snow White And The Huntsman, he’s producing Oz: The Great And Powerful; Maleficent, with Robert Stromberg directing and Angelina Jolie starring; and the Channing Tatum-attached Peter Pan Begins.

Keller also scripted Machine Gun Preacher and rewrote the upcoming Sylvester Stallone-Arnold Schwarzenegger pic The Tomb. He also scripted Go Like Hell for Fox, the battle for ’60s muscle car supremacy between Ford and Ferrari that has Michael Mann attached to direct. Keller’s repped by CAA and Management 360.