Several companies are in a bidding war to acquire the rights to The NeverEnding Story for a reboot of the 1984 film.
Per Deadline, streaming services and film studios are financially battling it out for the rights to Michael Ende's The NeverEnding Story. Some offers exceed several millions of dollars from companies both in the United States and Germany, all with the intention of creating a reboot of the popular children's fantasy film. Talks of a revival of The NeverEnding Story began almost ten years ago when Kennedy/Marshall Company and Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way Productions were looking to adapt the film. However, the struggle to acquire the rights prevented the project from taking off.
The NeverEnding Story was based on the first half of Ende's 1979 German novel of the same name. The book quickly rose to Germany's bestseller list and was adapted for the big screen in 1984 with The NeverEnding Story, director Wolfgang Petersen's first English-language film. Ende, who passed away in 1995, had sold the rights of his book to Petersen for only $50,000, a decision the author would later regret.
The NeverEnding Story follows a 10-year-old outcast named Bastian Bux and the magical book with the same title as the film. Through the book, Bastian discovers the enchanted world of Fantasia, a land threatened by a dark force called "The Nothing." A young warrior named Atreyu must travel the lands to search for a cure for the Childlike Empress. The NeverEnding Story arguably stayed close to the book's plot, except for minor details, like the name change of "Fantastica" to "Fantasia" and the number of gates to get to the Oracle.
At the time of its release, The NeverEnding Story had a budget of about $27 million, making it one of the most expensive films made outside the United States. The film initially received mixed reviews, but has since become a cult classic, with its theme song featured in Season 3 of Netflix's Stranger Things in a duet between Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Suzie (Gabriella Pizzolo). Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown even launched the #NeverEndingChallenge, which was a lip sync of the scene from the Netflix series.
While it is currently unclear where a potential reboot of The NeverEnding Story will wind up, film adaptations of Ende's novel have a complicated history. Ende hated the film adaptation so fervently that he wanted his name removed from the credits. "I was horrified. They had changed the whole sense of the story," Ende said in a 1984 interview. The author inevitably took the producers to court over the alterations to his work, for which he was unsuccessful as two more sequels were made: The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter in 1990 and The NeverEnding Story III: Escape from Fantasia in 1994.
Source: Deadline