50 YA Books We Want Adapted to the Big or Small Screen

Cover to The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness. Image via Walker Books.

38. Chaos Walking

According to Variety, this one’s already in pre-production and even has a star in Daisy Ridley of Star Wars fame. As of that report, filming should kick off sometime this year, with IMDb listing a 2018 release date for the first film and also listing Tom Holland in the film, though Variety instead reports that the newest Spider-Man is instead still in talks as of last November.

Regardless, Patrick Ness’ series starts off with The Knife of Never Letting Go, which opens on Todd’s life in Prentisstown, where there are no women and where everyone can hear thoughts. Unsurprisingly, the streams of consciousness have been dubbed Noise. Young Todd, though, discovers somewhere where there is no Noise, not even from his dog.

Along the way, he meets a girl — that’s where Ridley comes in for the film adaptation — and things get worse, as they tend to do in dystopian trilogies.

Since the trilogy’s already done, there’s no worries about the film series overtaking its literary counterpart, at least, and with Monsters of Men, the final book, clocking in at just over 600 pages, it seems like it’d be perfect for the final book split into two movies option that many series take these days, most notably Harry Potter and The Hunger Games.