Anne Rice sells film rights to "Christ Out of Egypt"

I've been meaning to post on this since Friday morning, but alas, haven't quite had the time. Back in May I linked to an article where Interview with a Vampire author Anne Rice was talking about trying to develop her novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt into a film. Well it looks like she's taken the next step. Variety is reporting that she has sold the rights to Good News Holdings run by a consortium including fellow author George Barna, and former Paramount president David Kirkpatrick. This is the first film to be made by the recently formed Good News Holdings who were created to develop "faith-based content in multimedia formats".

Variety notes how

Rice, who stopped writing gothic novels shortly after she returned to the Christian faith following a 38-year estrangement, has made researching and chronicling the life of Christ her singular mission since 2002. "Out of Egypt" was the first of what she expects will be a four-book series.

The first instalment began when Christ turned 7 years old and started to realize his destiny. The book covers the move of Christ and his Jewish family from Egypt to Nazareth.

As far as I'm aware there has yet to be a film that has really explored this stage of Jesus's life, which is not discussed in the gospels, although some of the non-canonical gospels cover this period including the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an incident from which was briefly shown in the American version of Jesus (1999) (IV.2). Having not read the book, I wonder if this "gospel" is a major source. Both works have Jesus leaving Egypt at the age of seven (III.2) and this would seem like a likely source for a book/film covering this stage in Jesus's life.

There is some more discussion about this project over at Cinematical, and, as ever, FilmChat. It looks like the plan is to release this in time for Christmas 2007 with plans to develop a number of sequels. Given that The Nativity Story is due for release this Christmas, I wonder if we'll see a Harry Potter-esque sequence of films about a boy with special powers growing up on our cinema screens every Christmas.