One of the most acclaimed YA novels from the past two decades is getting the movie treatment.
20th Century Studios has picked up the rights to M.T. Anderson’s seminal novel Feed, with Stanley Kalu, a 25-year old Nigerian filmmaker who recently graduated from USC, set to write and direct.
Zachary Green will produce the dystopian love story, which will mark Kalu’s feature directorial debut.
Recently named one of Time magazine’s 100 Best YA Books of All Time, Anderson’s Feed is set in a future dystopian America, where internet connections feed directly into the consumer’s brain. The plot centers on the unfolding love story between Titus Gray, an average kid on a weekend trip to the moon, and Violet Durn, a brainy girl who has decided to try to fight the feed.
The 2002 novel presciently tackled ideas of consumerism run amok, data mining and American decay. It became a 2002 National Book Award finalist and received a 2003 honor from the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards for Fiction. Some quarters consider the book dangerous, and it made the American Library Association’s list of 100 most frequently banned and challenged books every year from 2010 to 2019.
Feed will be directed and produced via Kalu and Green’s newly launched Bantu Inc. banner, whose mission is to produce socially relevant films from diverse filmmakers, to create impactful social change through the medium of film and television.
Kalu is a fast-rising filmmaking voice who splits his time between Nigeria and Los Angeles. He gained attention for winning The Launch: Million Dollar Screenplay Competition and having his script, The Obituary of Tunde Johnson, turned into a low-budget drama that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2019, opened the 2019 Austin Film Festival, and won the Audience Award for debut narrative feature at OutFest 2020. It received a theatrical and PVOD release in 2021 and garnered a 2022 GLAAD Media Awards nomination for outstanding film — limited release.
He recently wrote the Kenya Barris-produced sci-fi action project One Night in Compton for Paramount Players.
Kalu is repped by APA, Valor Entertainment Group and Hirsch Wallerstein.
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