WHEN SALLY GREEN’S HALF Bad scooped the 2015 Waterstones Teen Book Prize, it was only a matter of time before there was a bidding war for the screen rights. In the end, it was The Imaginarium wot won it. The production company set up in 2011 by actor/director Andy Serkis and producer Jonathan Cavendish had come across the book on its publication in 2014 and, in Cavendish’s words, both of them had “fallen in love with the world”.
The plan was to turn the first of Green’s fantasy trilogy into a feature. Writer Joe Barton, whom The Imaginarium were then working with on horror flick , duly crafted a screenplay, only for nothing to come of it. “So I kinda put it away and forgot about it,” Barton tells . “I moved on.” Then, a few years later, Serkis and Cavendish approached him once more and said they were now thinking of as a
