Craig Titley, who wrote Percy Jackson and the Olympians and worked on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., has been tapped to work on Ancient Aliens, Legendary’s feature based on The History Channel’s hit series.
Cobra Kai creators Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg and Josh Heald are producing the project via their Counterbalance Entertainment banner. Heald is on board to direct. Jon Jashni, the former president of Legendary, is also producing the project, which previously had a script by Luke Ryan.
Ancient Aliens is a pseudo-documentary series that has been airing since 2009 and deals with pseudo-science and the idea that extraterrestrial beings visited Earth in ancient times, sometimes provoking cultures into thinking they were gods.
Details of the project are being kept under wraps, but the story will be a two-handed, globe-spanning adventure featuring ancient sites and artifacts and will involve the theories and questions raised by the docuseries.
The series was exec produced by Kevin Burns, an Emmy-winning TV executive who produced countless hours of nonfiction programming for History, A&E, National Geographic and others. Burns, who died in September 2020, was previously partners with Jashni at Synthesis Entertainment.
The show has run more than 200 episodes and is one of History Channel’s longest-running shows. The series has spawned AlienCon, a convention based around Ancient Astronaut Theorist discussions that has been attracting 50,000 visitors a year since 2016.
Titley is a veteran screenwriter who wrote Steve Martin’s Cheaper by the Dozen comedy and worked on the first live-action adaptation of Scooby-Doo. He wrote 2010’s big-budget adaptation 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 exec producer on S.H.I.E.L.D. and is currently developing several series with POW! Entertainment, including an unreleased Stan Lee comic. Titley is repped by CAA, Authentic Talent & Literary and McKuin, Frankel.
