Like “Unobtainium,” the title of the novel The Informationist sounds like a cutesy made up term that is actually a real thing- perfect to capture James Cameron’s interest!
While there’s been hay made about the director exclusively directing Avatar movie from here on out, he’s just bought up a novel with the intent of developing it as a directorial effort, and one that will once again put an action heroine in a bigger-than-life story. The Informationalist is a series from Taylor Stevens that was first published in 2011 and released a sequel this year, and it’s one that has gained some attention for being vaguely similar to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, in that they both feature tortured action heroines that are competent at stuff- pop fiction doesn’t often stretch its wings in that regard.
The book is supposedly a globe-trotting adventure story that mixes as much Sherlock Holmes as it does Lisbeth Salander, but that hasn’t stopped the shallow comparisons to the point that the author has defended her timeline and sources of inspiration.
The story is about Vanessa Michael Munroe, the daughter of Americans working in Africa who, after a traumatic event in her teenage years that sent her on the run, became a world-class trafficker of information. Gathering intel with her extraordinary tradecraft skills, she sounds to me a bit like the Merovingian crossed with Catelaya from Columbiana. She’s highly sought after as a consultant for multi-national corporations and billionaires, and her story becomes messier when she gets involved in in a kidnapping case that returns her to Africa, as well as other places all across the globe.
This sounds like something Cameron can easily fund as a Indian Jones meets the grit of Dragon Tattoo and turn into a hit, meanwhile giving a woman a chance to lead a high-profile project (hopefully without the fixation on ugly sexual sensationalism). It also sounds like it could be a real blast, and a nice change of pace for the technology-obsessed director.
Frankly, I wish he’d skip the Avatar sequels and just move on to this right away.
This one is going to have a lot of time to develop though if Avatar 2 and 3 are really in front of it, so watch out for writers to be hired, short-lists to be made, rewrites to happen, casting to be secured, casting to be changed, etc. etc. for the next three or fours years…
Source | THR