Red Rising: The Hunger Games Director Will Lead Paramount’s New Sci-Fi Saga

Red Rising returns to the big screen: Paramount Pictures has acquired the rights to Pierce Brown’s science-fiction saga and chosen Francis Lawrence, director of much of The Hunger Games series, to direct the film adaptation of the first novel.

Twelve years after Hollywood’s first attempt, the Red Rising film once again has a studio, a director and a screenwriter. Paramount Pictures has acquired the film rights to Pierce Brown’s bestselling saga, appointing Francis Lawrence to direct the first installment and Justin Rhodes to write the screenplay. No cast, filming start date or theatrical release has been announced, and, above all, there is still no formal announcement of a film series: for now, Paramount is developing an adaptation of the first book.

Rhodes and Lawrence have already worked together on the development of Netflix’s BioShock adaptation; the screenwriter is also among the writers of Terminator: Dark Fate and has worked on The Traveler for Paramount, while his Liminal, based on the AWA graphic novel and starring Vanessa Kirby and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, recently wrapped filming. Lawrence will produce Red Rising with Cameron MacConomy through their company about:blank, alongside Francesco Goedhuis; Brown will executive produce.

From film to series, and back to film

In 2014, Universal bought the rights in a seven-figure deal after a bidding contest with Sony and brought in Marc Forster, coming off World War Z, to direct. Brown personally worked on several versions of the screenplay, but the project never reached production and the rights eventually reverted to the author.

The problem was structural: Brown said he had realized that compressing the first novel into a feature film meant cutting characters, plot points and much of the world-building. From 2018, he therefore began developing Red Rising as a television series, a format seemingly better suited to a saga destined to expand far beyond the dystopian competition of the first volume.

That version, however, also stalled. In March 2026, Brown explained that the television project was definitively dead and that, over twelve years, Red Rising had gone through three separate development cycles. On the same occasion, however, he teased the existence of a new live-action project, distinct from the canceled series. Seven months later, Paramount has revealed what form it might take.

The Red Rising film: Francis Lawrence changes planets, not social systems

The choice of Lawrence makes comparisons with The Hunger Games inevitable.

Red Rising begins in a society rigidly divided into color-coded castes, with the Golds at the top and the Reds among the subordinate classes. Its protagonist, Darrow, is a miner on Mars who believes he is working toward the planet’s future terraforming, until he discovers that Mars is already habitable and his community is being deliberately kept in slavery.

From there, Darrow begins infiltrating the Gold elite, but the saga quickly grows beyond the young-adult formula. Interplanetary wars, dynastic struggles, revolutions and politics gradually take the place of a simple game-based competition. Six novels have already been published, from Red Rising to Light Bringer, while Brown is working on the seventh and final book, Red God; by 2024, the series had surpassed six million copies sold.

Paramount therefore inherits much more than the potential “new Hunger Games” Universal bought in 2014. Today there is an established fictional universe, millions of readers and twelve years of expectations. In the meantime, Pierce Brown’s novel no longer needs that comparison: it has become, in its own right, one of the best science-fiction titles of the twenty-first century.