Craig Titley, who wrote: Percy Jackson and the Olympians and worked on Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, has been tapped to work on Ancient aliensLegendary’s feature based on The History Channel’s hit series.
Cobra Kai creators Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg and Josh Heald are producing the project through their Counterbalance Entertainment banner. Heal is on board to direct.
Jon Jashni, the former president of Legendary, is also producing the project, which was previously scripted by Luke Ryan.
Ancient aliens is a pseudo-documentary series that has aired since 2009 and deals with pseudoscience and the idea that aliens visited Earth in ancient times, leading cultures to sometimes think they were gods.
Details of the project will be kept secret, but the story will be a two-handed, global adventure featuring ancient sites and artifacts and will include the theories and questions raised by the docuseries.
The series was produced by Kevin Burns, an Emmy award-winning television executive who produced countless hours of nonfiction programming for History, A&E, National Geographic, and others. Burns, who passed away in September 2020, was previously Jashni’s partner at Synthesis Entertainment.
The show has run for over 200 episodes and is one of the History Channel’s longest-running shows. The series has spawned AlienCon, a convention based on Ancient Astronaut Theorist discussions that has attracted 50,000 annual visitors since 2016.
Titley is an accomplished screenwriter who wrote Steve Martin’s Cheaper per dozen comedy and worked on the first live-action adaptation of Scooby Doo† In 2010 he wrote the big budget adjustment of Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and worked on Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
More recently, he worked as a writer and executive producer on SHIELD and is currently developing several series with POW! Entertainment, including an unreleased Stan Lee comic.
Titley is represented by CAA, Authentic Talent & Literary and McKuin, Frankel.