Fox Animation has acquired the film rights to Mike Van Waes’ book “Peeves” and set up the project with Temple Hill Entertainment to produce, Variety has learned.
Van Waes has been set to write the adaptation of “Peeves” along with executive producing. The logline is being kept under wraps other than being described as a hybrid live-action/animation family franchise.
Producers are Temple Hill toppers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey. Ralph Millero is overseeing for Fox Animation and John Fischer is overseeing for Temple Hill.
Van Waes’ feature spec “Hammerspace” sold to Warner Bros. last year in a competitive situation and was set up at Lin Pictures. That project is centered on a dying teenager who finds a key that unlocks a world to an alternate dimension that helps him in his time of crisis.
Van Waes is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and was a reader for DreamWorks and Paramount. His script “Grave Hearts” was a finalist for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting in 2014.
Temple Hill produced the “Twilight” and “Maze Runner” franchises in addition to “The Fault in Our Stars.”
CAA, which brokered the deal with Fox Animation, simultaneously sold the “Peeves” publishing rights to HarperCollins.
Van Waes is represented by CAA, Grandview and attorney Michael Schenkman of Bloom Hergott Diemer Rosenthal LaViolette Feldman Schenkman & Goodman.
