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FilmNation Entertainment Acquires Ken Liu’s Sci-Fi Story ‘The Hidden Girl’ for Series Adaptation (EXCLUSIVE)

Fresh off its first Emmy win forI Know This Much Is True,” FilmNation Entertainment is continuing to drive into the TV space.

The company has acquired Ken Liu’s sci-fi short story “The Hidden Girl,” with the intention of adapting it into a series. Liu is attached to executive produce the project, which sources say is already in discussions with potential directors and showrunners.

News of the acquisition comes less than a month after Liu was announced as a consulting producer on David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo’s buzzy Netflix adaptation of “The Three-Body Problem.”

“The Hidden Girl” blends sci-fi and historical reality into a story set in a never-before-seen fantasy world derived from the cosmopolitan realities of Tang Dynasty China. In the story, a diverse group of women assassins travel through the fourth-dimension traversing space and time to kill their opponents, honor their professional code, and face down ethical dilemmas only too relevant for our conflict- and doubt-driven modern world.

“I wrote ‘The Hidden Girl’ to evoke a world of mathematical beauty animated by layered emotions and many-hued morals not limited to any single time or place. I can’t think of any team better suited to expanding and realizing that vision than FilmNation. It’s truly a pleasure and honor to get this chance to work with master visual storytellers of our age,” said Liu.

FilmNation’s EVP of television Stefanie Berk brought the project to the company following a bidding war, and will oversee the show alongside VP of television Courtney Saladino. The series will be produced in association with Wishmore, under the two companies’ recently-announced development deal.

“We are excited to expand our relationship with the multi-talented Ken Liu into television,” added Berk. “When we read ‘The Hidden Girl’ we were blown away by Ken’s unique crafting of an ever-expanding, genre bending world that manages to tell an epic story about family and sisterhood through the lens of a female multi-dimensional assassin. We can’t wait to bring this dynamic story to television.”

The project joins FilmNation’s growing TV slate, which also include “American Heiress” for Epix, as well as the upcoming adaptations of Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits,” Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise,” and John Updike’s “Rabbit, Run.”

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