'His Dark Materials' as next blockbuster fantasy franchise

"His Dark Materials" is a far more challenging proposition than its cinematic predecessors, and not only because of the complexity of its philosophical and scientific underpinnings. The books make a breathtakingly subversive attack on organized religion and on the notion of an all-powerful god. The trilogy has already been criticized by church organizations alarmed at its preference for humanism and for its depiction of a cruel fictional church that is obsessed with what it regards as the sexual purity of children but blinded by its own lust for power.

A movie director will be hired in the next month or so and filming should start in about a year. With a skittish eye, perhaps, on the power of religious groups in the United States, New Line's executives say they will probably insist that the books' repudiation of religion be softened into more of a meditation on the corruption of power in general. Mark Ordesky, executive vice president and chief operating officer of New Line Productions, said in an interview that "the real issue is not religion; it's authority — that's what's really the driving issue here."

"It's astonishing how uncompromising it is in introducing kids to an alternative mythology of death," [director of the stage play] Nicholas Hytner said, "how it finds a harsh consolation in the notion that death is death and that the worst possible thing, the most desperate thing, is that there is some kind of afterlife."