The Long Pilgrimage to Bring Dan Simmons’ Hyperion to the Screen

The Syfy channel is determined to live up to its name: Dan Simmons’ Hyperion is joining the production slate alongside other major adaptations like The Expanse and Childhood’s End. The “event series” is being developed by Bradley Cooper, Graham King, and Todd Phillips. The announcement is the culmination of years of effort by Cooper to bring a long-simmering dream project to the screen. But it’s also hardly the first time someone’s tried to tackle it.

The Hyperion Cantos is Simmons’ four-book SF magnum opus, beginning with 1989’s Hyperion, which follows seven pilgrims from the Church of the Final Atonement on a visit the titular planet. Each has one wish to ask of the Shrike, a mysterious, murderous, time-traveling entity. As the pilgrims journey to Hyperion, world, they recount how the stories of their lives brought them to this point, in a fashion reminiscent of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

Hyperion was enormously popular, earning the 1990 Hugo and Locus Awards for best novel, and nominations for the British Science Fiction and Arthur C. Clarke awards. In 1990, Simmons published a sequel, The Fall of Hyperion, which reads like the second half of one massive novel. Several years later, he produced a third sequel, Endymion, that jumps the narrative forward a few hundred years, and rounded that story off with a final installment, 1997’s The Rise of Endymion. Simmons, who got his start as a horror author in the early 1980s, had produced an mature space opera epic, one which knowingly drew from the decades of genre history that preceded it.

Since its publication, there has been incredible interest in adapting the complicated books to film. Early options were picked up by director James Cameron, while Martin Scorsese was attached to the project along with Leonardo DeCaprio in 2003. At points, Simmons produced his own script treatments. In 2009, Scott Derrickson (The Day The Earth Stood Still and the upcoming Doctor Strange) was slated to direct for Warner Bros., but the project never made it out of pre-production. Later, actor Bradley Cooper, who had been turned onto the series by a friend, was inspired to produce his own script alongside Conal Byrne. The pair brought their work to Graham King, producer of Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, and Hugo, who owned the rights.

Since 2011, Cooper has spoken about his desire to write and direct the adaptation. He is no stranger to science fiction: his breakout role was as Will Tippin in Alias, and he’s acted in big-budget SF projects like Limitless (both the film and the upcoming television series, which he’s producing and will occasionally act in), and Guardians of the Galaxy. Earlier this week, the Syfy channel announced the latest plan to adapt the book as a miniseries event.

The move to a television miniseries makes a sense, given its expansive plot and episodic structure, not to mention the network’s recent, renewed commitment to adapting the best properties in the genre. Moreover, science fiction and fantasy television has exploded in recent years; the successes of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead—and the anticipated debuts like The Expanse and The Magicians—have demonstrated that there’s a strong demand for long-form adaptations of flashy, high-concept genre properties.

It’s exciting to see Syfy devote so much energy to bringing big books to the screen: television as a medium has reached a point where novels that could never have worked before, either in theaters or on the small screen, can be given their due. The biggest question remains: with so many failed productions in its wake, will Syfy be able to bring this one into port? The rest of the  year—and, in particular, the success or failure of The Expanse–will tell us more.