Max Brooks’ Big Foot Novel to Be Adapted by Legendary Pictures

The last time Max Brooks’ “grounded” and hard-nosed fiction about a fantastic idea was turned into a movie, we got Brad Pitt versus a swarm of millions of CGI zombies in World War Z. One can only imagine what bringing Brooks’ next book, Devolution, to the big screen will mean. But Legendary Pictures is ready to find out.

The news, which was announced via The Hollywood Reporter, revealed that despite being on bookshelves (or at least Amazon) for less than 24 hours, Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainer Sasquatch Massacre has already inked a deal to get the big screen treatment with the production company that helped give us Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters. However, this is not necessarily a shock since Devolution began as a movie pitch for Brooks.

Indeed, Devolution was originally going to be a movie produced by Legendary Pictures back at the beginning of the last decade, with Brooks attached alongside David Leslie Johnson. But that project eventually fell through and Brooks decided to turn the idea into a novel.

In much the same way that the World War Z book was written as if it were a comprehensive journalistic account of the next world war against zombies, Devolution is a scientific journal and personal diary about Sasquatch descending on a town nestled by Mt. Rainier in Washington, following a volcanic eruption. An eco-friendly town thus becomes ground zero for a bloody clash of species.

The official book synopsis is below:

“As the ash and chaos from Mount Rainier’s eruption swirled and finally settled, the story of the Greenloop massacre has passed unnoticed, unexamined . . . until now. The journals of resident Kate Holland, recovered from the town’s bloody wreckage, capture a tale too harrowing—and too earth-shattering in its implications—to be forgotten. In these pages, Max Brooks brings Kate’s extraordinary account to light for the first time, faithfully reproducing her words alongside his own extensive investigations into the massacre and the legendary beasts behind it. Kate’s is a tale of unexpected strength and resilience, of humanity’s defiance in the face of a terrible predator’s gaze, and, inevitably, of savagery and death.

“Yet it is also far more than that. Because if what Kate Holland saw in those days is real, then we must accept the impossible. We must accept that the creature known as Bigfoot walks among us—and that it is a beast of terrible strength and ferocity.”