There was a time when it looked like The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones wasn't even going to happen. The adaptation of Cassandra Clare's supernatural series sat in limbo as producers decided whether to go through with it, losing a director in the process. But Constantin Film moved forward with it, setting Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower as the two young leads, and putting Harald Zwart in the director's chair. Now as the film is still months away from hitting theaters, they're so confident that a prequel is already in the works.
THR has hired Stephanie Sanditz to begin work on a script for Infernal Devices, based on the spinoff series penned by Clare. City of Bones follows Clary Fray, a regular teen who discovers she comes from a long line of half-angel, half-human warriors known as Shadowhunters. The three books that comprise Infernal Devices are set in Victorian England, and center on a new central heroine involved with the ancestors of many characters.
This is a pretty big gamble considering the recent failures of The Host and Beautiful Creatures. Novels that don't quite reach the level of Twilight or The Hunger Games have had a hard time breaking through on the big screen. Constantin has apparently been emboldened by a recent WonderCon panel in which the Fray character was extremely popular, even without Collins in the costume. That probably won't make her agents too happy, know their client is basically interchangeable with any female, but oh well!
There's always the chance that these plans get shut down if The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones turns out to be a flop on August 23rd.
