Warner Brothers Options Heist Society, A "Thomas Crown Affair For Teens"; Ironically, The Thomas Crown Affair 2 Also Moves Foward

Within the next few years, you can safely expect to see just about every film genre reworked for teens — the last few that haven't already been fed into the Teen Machine will be lined up right quick. Not that there's anything wrong with that, necessarily. Skewing a film young doesn't mean it will be crap as an absolute, by any means. But when is a teen movie not a teen movie? When the studio responsible buys a young lit property and then skews the character ages up into their 20s. When every other project lately is about skewing ages down, that's a bit confusing.

The reason for all that preamble is that Warner Bros. has picked up the rights to Heist Society, a young-lit novel that will be published next week. Described as The Thomas Crown Affair for teens, the book could spawn a heist film for audiences for those who think the Oceans movies were too slow-paced.

Ally Carter's book is about "a young woman named Katarina Bishop who hails from an extended family of cat burglars and master thieves. The girl leaves her illicit life behind, but when her father is the prime suspect behind a mobster's missing art collection, she assembles a crew to track down the art and steal it back." (Sounds like with just a few changes that could also become a movie version of the Sly Cooper video game series. But that's neither here nor there...)

The trade report doesn't offer more details than the fact that screenwriter Shauna Cross and producer Denise Di Novi are involved, but it does say that WB is going to age the characters into their 20s rather than have them as teens. Oddly, I almost like the teen idea better. [THR]

Meanwhile, while promoting Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Pierce Brosnan said that a sequel to The Thomas Crown Affair was still kicking. ComingSoon got a few details about the proposed sequel:

We've got the fourth script in and this is the closest we've gotten in structure to making sense. It's very very hard. Now we have the character, it's not really fleshed out, so we have to work on him, Mr. Crown, and her, Miss Moore, another affair, more art, but it has to be an unexpected surprise.

Last we heard, Paul Verhoeven was attached to direct and the film was to be a remake of sorts of the film Topkapi. (A pretty great, breezy heist movie, that one. Maybe a little heavy on the oiled Turkish wrestling, but otherwise a lot of fun.) ComingSoon didn't ask about either of those elements, but don't be surprised if Verhoeven has long since moved on.