John Davis is no stranger to the sci-fi genre having producer all of the Predator films as well as I, Robot and Paycheck.  His biggest challenge when it comes to sci-fi lies ahead with a planned adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.  Bradbury said of his celebrated work that it was “a book of stories pretending to be a novel.”  Those individual stories relate to the human colonization of Mars and the conflict between the colonists and the natives.

Steve recently spoke with Davis about the film.  Davis says he’s met with Bradbury (who is now 94) and gotten his input on the adaptation.  Davis adds that he envisions the movie (which is set up at Paramount) as a summer blockbuster but “one with a weighty intellectual background.”  Hit the jump for the full exchange with Davis.  Click here for what Davis had to say about the Predator franchise and click here for what he said about Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Paramount has acquired the rights to Ray Bradbury’s short-story collection The Martian Chronicles. The adaptation will be an ambitious undertaking, as the collection involves inter-connected short stories which tell the tale of humans’ attempt to colonize Mars, much to the dismay of the native Martians living on the planet. Producer John Davis optioned the rights to the book last summer, and now Heat Vision reports that Paramount has come onboard to finance the flick.

This isn’t the first time Bradbury’s 1950 book has been adapted: it was turned into an NBC miniseries in 1980 starring Rock Hudson. Then, in 1997, Davis and Steven Spielberg tried to get the project off the ground at Universal. Obviously, that never materialized, and when the rights reverted earlier this year Paramount jumped in. The studio is now looking for a writer to work on the screenplay. Hit the jump to read a synopsis of the book.

Since the success of Avatar, studios are willing to offer escapist fare that has humans escaping our planet.  24 Frames reports that producer John Davis (Alien vs. Predator and I, Robot) has optioned the film rights to author Ray Bradbury’s classic collection of science fiction short-stories The Martian Chronicles.  The 1950 book is an interlinking series of adventures that takes place after humans have escaped a devastated Earth and landed on an already-populated Mars.  Bradbury was optimistic about our chances of reaching the red planet since he set the book in the year 2000 and 2005.  He was also optimistic that humans would continue pursuing space exploration and not fall victim to our short attention spans.

It will be interesting to see if Davis will push this into production or if he’ll wait to see if audiences are still interested in life on Mars after seeing Andrew Stanton’s John Carter of Mars in 2012.