Disney to Pay $8 Million for Fantasy Series

Walt Disney Co. has agreed to buy the rights to a quartet of adventure books to be written by horror-fantasy author and filmmaker Clive Barker for close to $8 million.

Envisioning Barker’s fantastic world as the basis for a modern-day “Wizard of Oz” tale, Disney has far-reaching plans for what Barker refers to as “The Abarat Quartet.” The potential movie series could spawn theme park rides, television series, games and of course a whole slew of licensed products and merchandise that it can sell in its own and others’ retail stores.

“We perceive this as a great theatrical series as well as a franchise that we can exploit across all our vertically integrated businesses,” said Michael Mendenhall, president of studio marketing and synergy, who spearheaded the deal with Barker attorney David Colden and ICM agent Ben Smith.

Disney and Barker make an odd pairing considering that, as a filmmaker, Barker’s biggest success is with the horror genre, with series such as “Hellraiser.” Barker assures that this series will not be drenched in blood.

Though he hasn’t written them yet, Barker has outlined the stories and painted 250 oils detailing the adventures of a 16-year-old girl named Candy Quackenbush from Minnesota who ventures into an inter-dimensional fantasy world known as Abarat.

The first of the books is to be published in 2001 by HarperCollins, followed by one every nine months until all four, if not more, are published. Disney does not own the publishing rights.

Sources said Barker, a best-selling author as well as a filmmaker, will get nearly $4 million in advance for the rights to his literary properties and another $4 million when the first movie goes into production.

Like Harry Potter, Barker’s heroine starts out in the real world and journeys to a place we’ve never seen before. His characters, however, remain in the fantasy world for most of their adventures. Also an artist, Barker created Abarat--comprising 24 islands for each hour in the day--in a montage of paintings hanging in nearly every room of his Hollywood Hills home.

Barker, 47, who was born and raised in Liverpool, England, and by the mid-1990s had written novels, short stories and comic books, said in an interview, “This project is closer to my heart than anything I’ve done before. In 15 years of publishing and movie making, nothing has excited me more.”

Barker said his three points of inspiration were Disney’s classic “Fantasia,” which he calls “my favorite movie of all time,” C.S. Lewis’ classic English books “The Chronicles of Narnia” and Quebec’s avant-garde circus phenomenon Cirque du Soleil.

A self-admitted “technophobe,” Barker spent the last 3 1/2 years working out the structure for all four books and drafting the first one in longhand. “I was looking for a partner to take this world into every other medium,” he said. His book “The Thief of Always,” published in the mid-’90s, is in a similar vein as the “Abarat” series. Universal has the movie rights.

The heads of Disney’s various divisions, including animation, motion pictures and interactive, held five meetings with Barker at his house, listening to him detail the story and viewing his artwork.