Pirates of the Caribbean director to adapt Sandkings by George R.R. Martin

Gore Verbinski, the guy behind the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, is adapting George R.R. Martin’s “twisted” story Sandkings for Netflix.

There is a lot of George R.R. Martin news in the air lately. The A Song of Ice and Fire author recently revealed that he’s producing an adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s novel Roadmarks for HBO, on top of trying to finish up his book The Winds of Winter. And completely independently, Resident Evil director Paul W.S. Anderson is adapting his 1982 short story The Lost Lands as a movie, with Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista on board to star.

And now, Collider brings us the news that Gore Verbinski — the director behind the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, The Ring and more) will be adapting Martin’s 1979 novelette Sandkings for Netflix. “[O]ne of the screenplays [I’m working on] is based on a George R.R. Martin short story called Sandkings, which is this brilliant little twisted short story that I love.” Dennis Kelly is writing the movie.

A novelette, if you’re curious, is longer than a short story but not as long as a novella, which isn’t as long as a novel. Now that that’s out of the way, Verbinski is right to call the story twisted. Without giving everything away, it’s about a wealthy playboy named Simon Kress, who lives on the distant planet of Baldur. Kress enjoys keeping exotic pets, but meets his match when he purchases a terrarium full of creatures called Sandkings. Bored with the Sandkings’ placidity, he starves them and makes them fight with each other for food, and then pits them against other animals and takes bets from his friends on who will win.

I won’t say more, but you’re probably guessing that this mistreatment will come back to bite him, and you’d be right.

There’s no word on when Sandkings will come out. What’s clear is that Martin has become an incredibly hot commodity in the wake of Game of Thrones, with producers eager to adapt his work. I’ll underline that Martin, who has a deal with HBO, has nothing to do with this adaptation, nor with the movie adaptation of The Lost Lands; this is just a case of producers seeing how huge Game of Thrones was and hoping adapting Martin’s other works will result in similar success.

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