QC Entertainment Lands TV Rights To Chuck Wendig Novel ‘Wanderers’

EXCLUSIVE: QC Entertainment, the producers behind Get Out and BlacKkKlansman, are branching into TV. They have closed a deal in heavy bidding for Wanderers, the upcoming novel by bestselling author Chuck Wendig. They aim to turn it into a socially relevant, provocative TV series that will be produced by QC’s Sean McKittrick and Ray Mansfield and producer Ilene Staple, who brought the project to QC.

The book will be published by Penguin Random House’s Del Rey imprint on July 2.

Here’s the logline: A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and her sister are not alone. Soon they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey. And like Shana, there are other “shepherds” who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead.

For on their journey, they will discover an America convulsed with terror and violence, where this apocalyptic epidemic proves less dangerous than the fear of it. As the rest of society collapses all around them—and an ultraviolent milita threatens to exterminate them—the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart—or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.

Wanderers marks QC’s first event television series after partners McKittrick, Mansfield and Edward H. Hamm Jr helped hatch the Jordan Peele-directed Get Out and Spike Lee-directed BlacKkKlansman. For the latter, QC were early champions of Ron Stallworth’s incredible story and were the ones to first board the project when they acquired the rights to the book. They were also in on the ground floor with Get Out and saw back-to-back Oscar noms for Best Picture and screenplay and captured the zeitgeist.

McKittrick followed by producing Peele’s current hit, Us.

Wanderers is Wendig’s much anticipated next book after his New York Times bestselling trilogy Star Wars: Aftermath. Wendig has also authored the Miriam Black thrillers, the Atlanta Burns books, Zer0es and Invasive, alongside other works across comics, games, film and more. He was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and an alum of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and he served as the co-writer of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative “Collapsus.”

Wendig is repped by ICM Partners. The deals were negotiated by attorney Chris Abramson of Felker Toczek Suddleson Abramson on behalf QC and ICM Partners’ Josie Freedman and literary agent Stacia Decker at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner on behalf of Wendig.