Idris Elba has spent much of the past year backing African film projects, and that increasingly looks like a meaningful part of this stage of his career. Earlier this month, his production company, 22Summers, teamed with Moses Babatope’s Nigeria-based Nile Media Entertainment Group and Chee Keong Cheung’s UK genre label Action Xtreme to develop a slate of commercial action films rooted in African stories and talent.
That followed news that Google and Elba would help fund access to artificial intelligence tools for African creators, with the aim of making high-quality content faster and less expensive to produce. With a new Luther film also taking shape at Netflix, with Ruth Wilson returning as Alice Morgan after sitting out Luther: The Fallen Sun in 2023, Elba does not appear to be slowing down. So it makes a certain amount of sense that his next big-screen appearance would land at the intersection of those interests, in a Hollywood-scale fantasy built on West African mythology.
Paramount has released a first-look featurette for Children of Blood and Bone, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s screen adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi’s bestselling novel. The first trailer will be released tomorrow, Jul. 28, 2026. In the meantime, a featurette takes us inside the world of Orïsha. Watch it below:
Adeyemi’s 2018 novel debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list and set off a rights frenzy that moved between studios for much of the past decade before landing at Paramount. The story follows Zélie Adebola (Thuso Mbedu), a young woman in the kingdom of Orïsha, where magic once flowed freely before a ruthless crown stamped it out. Her effort to bring that power back draws her and her brother into the orbit of two of the king’s children, setting up the story’s central tension.
Damson Idris plays Prince Inan, and the surrounding ensemble is a little staggering, with Amandla Stenberg, Cynthia Erivo, Lashana Lynch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Regina King, Tosin Cole, Zackary Momoh, and Nollywood veteran Richard Mofe-Damijo all aboard. The creative team behind the camera may be just as impressive. Production designer Hannah Beachler won an Oscar for Black Panther, and cinematographer Polly Morgan previously shot The Woman King for Prince-Bythewood, which at the very least suggests the film is in very capable hands.
Prince-Bythewood’s approach, as she has described it, does not seem to be centered on CGI spectacle. Speaking with Variety, she discussed her process of adapting Adeyemi’s sweeping novel into a “grounded fantasy epic,” saying, “despite this fantastical conceit of magic and fantasy, I wanted the audience to feel grounded like they were in the real world.” She added that it “starts with production design. It goes to costume, it goes to casting, it goes to action.”
There is one complication hanging over the production, though. The featurette arrives not long after Adeyemi publicly said she is distancing herself from the film adaptation. How much that matters to general audiences is debatable, since most moviegoers won’t know or care, but it could dampen enthusiasm among the book’s core fanbase, which is precisely the audience a January fantasy release needs to show up on opening weekend. Original big-budget fantasy is already a tough sell theatrically, and this one carries franchise hopes, given the source material is a trilogy. A full trailer should give a much clearer sense of whether all of this is building toward something special.
- Release Date
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January 15, 2027
- Director
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Gina Prince-Bythewood
- Writers
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Gina Prince-Bythewood, Tomi Adeyemi
- Producers
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Reggie Rock Bythewood, Wyck Godfrey, Karen Rosenfelt, Marty Bowen
