Candr Pictures to Adapt Walker's Post-Apocalyptic Novel
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- Candr Pictures optioned the rights to adapt Adrian J. Walker's 'The End of The World Running Club' into a feature film, with Chris Reading attached to write and direct.
- Chris Reading, best known for comedy sci-fi 'Time Travel Is Dangerous,' was praised by Walker for a 'uniquely British blend of dark humour, sci-fi and humanity' that the author called a perfect fit for the source material.
- Adrian J. Walker joins the project as Executive Producer, telling Deadline he still receives messages from new readers worldwide about how the book moved them.
- The novel is set after catastrophic asteroid impacts across Europe and follows Edinburgh father Ed on a desperate 500-mile footrace to reach his family before the last evacuation ships leave Britain's shores.
- The source book was published by Penguin Random House UK and has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Czech, and Turkish — a built-in international audience the adaptation can tap.
- Reading framed the project as filling a genre gap, noting 'we don't see many British apocalypse stories' and pointing to the premise's simplicity — 'one man trying to get to his family' — as the emotional core.
Why it matters: Walker said the novel still moves new readers across five translation markets, and Candr's pairing of the project with Reading — whose 'Time Travel Is Dangerous' established a dark-comedy sci-fi sensibility — points to an adaptation that leans into the book's British humour rather than generic disaster-movie tone. The 500-mile Edinburgh-to-shore footrace gives the film a built-in narrative engine few apocalypse scripts can match.
