'Interstellar' Writer Jonathan Nolan Developing Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation' for HBO

With Christopher Nolan's Interstellar racking up a huge $130M worldwide at the box office, his screenwriting brother Jonathan is embarking on another sci-fi venture, one that fans of the genre have been waiting a long time for. The Wrap reports Nolan will write and produce an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's classic novels, Foundation, as a series for HBO.

This is the second series Nolan and HBO are teaming up on as he's currently developing Westworld, and the network must be extremely happy with how that's going to agree to this. Nolan is definitely stoked, as just days ago he was talking to ThePlaylist about how much he loved Foundation...

Nolan: "Well, I fucking love the ‘Foundation’ novels by Isaac Asimov —they’re certainly not well-known, but that’s a set of books I think everyone would benefit from reading. That’s a set of books where the influence they have is just fucking massive; they have many imitators and many have been inspired by them, but go back and read those, and there are some ideas in those that’ll set your fucking hair on fire."

 He won't be the first to attempt a Foundation adaptation. Roland Emmerich had been planning to turn it into a feature film for Sony, but when the rights lapsed Warner Bros. swooped in and struck this deal with HBO. The Hugo Award-winning book series was first published in 1951 and was a trilogy until 1981 when he began adding further sequels. The collected series follows “a mathematician named Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian who is able to predict large-scale events using scientific principles. When Seldon foresees the downfall of the Galactic Empire, which will precipitate a dark age lasting 30,000 years, he establishes two human oases (”Foundations”) in an effort to preserve human knowledge.”

No word on how many episodes, who will direct them, or when this will begin production but likely not until Westworld wraps up next year.