Joe Cornish, writer and director of the alien invasion film Attack the Block, will write and direct an adaptation of the Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash. Paramount Pictures purchased the film rights, and the project will be produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Kennedy/Marshall.
This is the second time Paramount has attempted to make this film, first trying when the book was published in 1992.
The cyber-punk bestseller is set in the near-future, according to Deadline.com, when the U.S. exists as a “patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and private enterprise and the mafia control everything.”
During the story, a computer virus manifests as a drug called Snow Crash, and is transmitted visually from computer screens to users, damaging their brains. Hiro Protagonist, the computer hacking, sword wielding, pizza delivering main character, attempts to stop the attack.
Read the official plot summary below:
“One of Time magazine’s 100 all-time best English-language novels. Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison—a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age. In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous…you’ll recognize it immediately.”
Stephenson has explained that the title of the novel comes from his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Apple Macintosh computer. He described it as “When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set — a ‘snow crash.'”
The novel has always influenced culture as well as its influence on the Internet as we know today. The novel is responsible for the term “Avatar” being the accepted term for your online virtual presence in computer games. Several of the worlds leading virtual globe programs utilized by Nasa and the Google Earth function were at least partly inspired by the “Earth” software developed by the central corporation in “Snow Crash.”