Universal Adapting Best-Selling Novel Lore, Described as Hunger Games Meets Greek Mythology

The New York Times bestselling novel Lore is headedd to the big screen. On Thursday, a report from The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Universal is developing an adaptation of Lore, based on Alexandra Bracken’s novel of the same name. The film version of Lore will be written by Snake Eyes screenwriters Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, and produced by Spider-Man producer Amy Pascal. Bracken will also be executive producing, and Lexi Barta and Jacqueline Garell will oversee the film on behalf of Universal.

This is the second novel of Bracken’s to be made into a feature, after 20th Century Fox adapted The Darkest Minds into a film led by Amandla Stenberg and Harris Dickinson.

What is Lore about?

Lore is described as Hunger Games meets Greek mythology, follows Lore Perseous whose family was murdered as a part of the Agon, a divine hunt that occurs every seven years as punishment for a past rebellion by nine Greek gods, who are forced to walk the earth as mortals and be hunted. After years in hiding, Lore has to decide if she re-enters the Agon to avenge her family’s death with the help of a childhood friend she thought was dead and Athena, one of the last of the original gods.

“As a writer, I keep a running list of “wishlist” ideas, and the Agon was really the result of two of those wishlist items colliding with one another!” Bracken explained in an interview with Quills and Stardust. “I’d been longing to write a story that used Greek mythology for so, so long, but none of my ideas ever felt fresh enough to me, and there wasn’t an obvious and natural way to set them in our modern world, which is what I really wanted to do. At the same time, I’d been hoping to challenge myself to write a story that used the framework of some kind of competition or even a race. I’m not sure why it took me so long to see how those two could connect—hunts and athletic competitions played important roles in Ancient Greek cultures and featured strongly in the myths. Given that both are still very much a part of our world, I knew it would be really interesting to explore how such an ancient version of a hunt would fit into an incredibly modern city.”  

“The other main inspiration for it was how perfectly cruel so many godly punishments were in the myths,” Bracken continued. “One good (AKA horrifying) example of this is the story of Actaeon, who was a hunter who kept a large pack of hunting dogs. One version of the story goes that he came upon Artemis bathing, and she warned him that if he spoke again, she would turn him into a stag. Well, he spoke, was transformed into a stag, and was then torn apart by his own dogs (ouch!)—the hunter became the hunted. Similarly, the gods of the Agon were willing to sacrifice millions of humans in a bid to keep their power and prominence, so it felt right somehow to have Zeus then curse them to experience a taste of that powerlessness and mortality.”

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