Aside from working on Disney's next live action fairy tale adaptation Beauty and the Beast, Harry Potter alum and UN Ambassadress for gender equality Emma Watson is all set to work on another fantasy flick called Queen of the Tearling.
According to Hypable, Warner Bros. has already obtained film rights to the same-titled novel that is written by Erika Johansen. And while Watson was eager to stay away from movie franchises after her stint as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series, something about Queen of the Tearling just drew her in.
"I had kind of said I would never do a franchise again, so I was desperate to hate it," Watson told Wonderland Magazine. "Unfortunately, I didn't sleep for about a week because I couldn't put the bloody thing down. It would be fair to say I became obsessed with the role and the book. Now I am executive-producing it."
This will be the first time Watson will be co-producing a film, and she will be working on it together with David Heyman.
The book Queen of the Tearling has not even been released yet, and is expected to be sold in stores sometime this July. It will be a trilogy about a 19-year-old princess named Kelsea Glynn (the character to be played by Watson) " who must reclaim her deceased mother's throne and redeem her kingdom, the Tearling, from forces of corruption and dark magic of The Red Queen, the sorceress-tyrant of the neighboring country, Mortmesne," according to a synopsis.
It is set three centuries after a small population of the human race populated a mass of land that mysteriously emerged after an environmental catastrophe.
Meanwhile, Harper-Collins editor Maya Ziv, who edited the novel has nothing but praises for it too, and that is why excitement for the novel's release is at an all time high. "One of my colleagues read the book, loved it and left it at home. His 11-year-old daughter then read the book and loved it, too," she said. "It just brought back the wondrous sense of reading and falling into a whole new world."
The publisher of Queen of the Tearling even described the book as "a female-oriented Game of Thrones that is also an insightful human story whose heroine is grappling with both the daily realities of coming-of-age and the ethical dilemmas of ruling justly-all while simply trying to stay alive."
