11.12.09 RUSH TO RIPOFF TWILIGHT LEADS TO ‘MULTI-LIFE ROMANCE’ MOVIE

(This picture came up in a Google Image Search for “reincarnation.”  I dunno, man.)

Movie people were surprised by the success of Twilight when it first hit, but rest assured they won’t be the next time. These days they option promising young-adult series before they’re even published.  Like I Am Number Four before it, the movie rights to Traveling Pants author Ann Brashares’ upcoming series My Name is Memory have been acquired almost a year before the first book will be published.  See, because kids are stupid.  As Roman Polanski knows, you can just shove anything down their throats.

Peter Chernin won a bidding battle for screen rights to the first of a three-book series. Deal was for high-six against seven figures. ['against' meaning if the movie actually gets made]
Sold on the basis of a first installment that will be published next June by the Penguin imprint Riverhead Books, the series begins as a college-age couple meets, and a young man makes a startling confession. Turns out their souls have been reincarnated over hundreds of years, but these soulmates keep losing each other. While he remembers the details of their previous lives— and his often exasperating attempts to connect with her romantically—she cannot recall the events of those past lives. [Variety]

They both keep getting reincarnated as humans who live in the same neighborhood, well isn’t that convenient.  Their romance would be a lot more complicated if she came back as, say, a goat and he was a slime mold.  In fact, I wonder if that’s what happened in the case of the chimp and the toad:

I love the chimp’s thought process here. “Oh look, a strange green amphibian.  I’ve never seen one of those before.  Hey, I wonder if I could f-ck its mouth.”

The child crying in the background really brings it all together. [via Buzzfeed]