Kenneth Branagh will once again help transform a magical children’s story into a motion picture. As an actor he has played the dashing, but secretly incompetent, Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and this year he directed the live-action version of Cinderella. Now, Branagh will once again go behind the camera to direct an adaptation of the hit sci-fi fantasy novel, Artemis Fowl.

According to The Tracking Board, the 2001 novel by Eoin Colfer will get a long-awaited film after a complicated string of failed starts that have delayed a movie almost since the book’s release. Branagh was recently brought on to direct a remake of Murder on the Orient Express, and he’s no stranger to leading an action movie, as he directed 2011’s Thor. (Amazingly, the renowned Shakespearean actor has never been involved in a film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a story all about magic. How is that even possible?)

The book, once described by the author as “Die Hard meets fairies,” tells the story of a teenage criminal genius who kidnaps an important fairy he hopes to ransom for a large amount of gold. The novel became an eight-book series that concluded in 2012.

If the movie version of Artemis Fowl manages to be as successful as Harry Potter or The Hunger Games we’ll be getting a lot of these movies for a long time.

Are you an Artemis Fowl fan? If so, what are you most excited to see translated from the page to the screen? Tell us in the comments below, because we need to know everything about something described as “Die Hard with fairies.”

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HT: TB

Image: TheFilmStage.com