Amazon.com is moving from selling books and other odds an ends to making movies. A sure sign that they’ve got too much money.
Variety says the online retailer is optioning the movie rights to the Keith Donahue novel “The Stolen Child”. They won’t actually finance the production, instead they’re shopping it around to Hollywood studios and other potential partners looking for someone who actually knows something about movies to put it on movie screens.
Amazon.com spokesman Drew Herdner says “With our brand and our retail experience and customers around the world we believe we can be an extremely valuable partner in the development, marketing and distribution of this film.” In a way he’s right, though they seem more suited to a multi-tiered marketing deal with a major Hollywood studio than actually developing their own films. Take a look at what Starbucks did with Akeelah and the Bee. They marketed the hell out of it in their stores and made a little money off it, but they didn’t stick their noses into actually making movies. Something like that seems like a better fit for Amazon.com than this.
But ever savvy Amazon.com has always been quick to jump on diversifying. On the web it's diversify or die. These days there’s almost nothing you can’t buy on their site. In fact, you might have a hard time actually finding the books with which they first got their selling start amidst all the other millions of types of entertainment and shopping content.
So what exactly is The Stolen Child about? Amazon describes it as “a bedtime story for adults”, which might give some of you horrifying flashbacks to a certain recently released, reportedly very bad M. Night Shyamalan movie. Don’t worry, no narfs here. In the book, two narrators tell intertwining stories. One, an adult trying to remember his “stolen” childhood. The other, a 7-year-old child trapped in time. Folk legends about changlings and faeries are mixed in to link the two stories together when 7-year-old Henry is kidnapped by hobgoblins and replaced by an imposter.
