Focus Features has set director Juan Antonio Bayona’s A Monster Calls for a wide release on October 14, 2016. Based on the award-winning children’s fantasy novel by Patrick Ness (the “Chaos Walking” trilogy), the film will be produced by Belen Atienza.
A Monster Calls is a drama about a young boy who attempts to deal with his mother’s illness and the bullying of his classmates by escaping into a fantastical world of monsters and fairy tales that deal with courage, loss and faith. Ness wrote the novel based on an original idea by the late Siobhan Dowd, and he and illustrator Jim Kay won Britain’s prestigious Carnegie Medal and Greenaway Medal in 2012, presented to the year’s best children’s literature in the UK.
Ness is adapting the screenplay from his novel with River Road’s Bill Pohlad and Mitch Horwits, Participant Media’s Jeff Skoll and Jonathan King, and Lionsgate Motion Picture Group Co-Chairman Patrick Wachsberger executive producing.
A Monster Calls currently has no competition that weekend. In fact, it’s the first film that has been officially dated for that entire month.
