Siobhan Dowd | Hispanically Yours

Juan Antonio Bayona’s Monster project will call on American audiences in October 2016…

Focus Features has announced plans to release A Monster Calls, the film directed by the 37-year-old Spanish filmmaker, on October 14, 2016.

Based on the award-winning children’s fantasy novel by Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls centers on a young boy who attempts to deal with his mother’s illness and school bullies by escaping into a fantastical world of monsters and fairy tales.

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 United Kingdom.

Ness is adapting the screenplay from his novel.

Bayona’s last project, The Impossible, earned him a Goya Award for Best Director in February 2013.

Juan Antonio Bayona has landed a monster project…

The 37-year-old Spanish filmmaker, whose most recent film The Impossible earned him five Goya Awards, including Best Director, will next direct the film A Monster Calls.

It’s a film adaptation of the children’s fantasy novel of the same name by Patrick Ness from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd.

Set in present-day England, it centers on a boy who struggles to cope with the consequences of his mother’s terminal cancer; he is serially visited in the middle of the night by a monster who tells stories. Dowd suffered from terminal cancer herself when she started the story and died before she could write it.

The film adaptation is already on course to begin production this fall for a 2016 release.

Ness adapted the script his Carnegie Medal– and Greenaway Medal-winning work.

The film is being financed by River Road Entertainment and Participant Media. Meanwhile, Focus Features has committed $20 million to release A Monster Calls.

While Bayona is separately attached to helm a sequel to the zombie saga World War Z this film will come first.

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Focus Features to Release the Bayona-Directed “A Monster Calls” In October 2016

Bayona to Direct the Film Adaptation of “A Monster Calls”