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Since she finished filming Harry Potter three years ago, Emma Watson has been experimenting. She's got two movies opening this week: In This is the End, she plays an axe-wielding, foul-mouthed version of herself; in The Bling Ring, she plays a celebrity-robbing, stuck-up Southern California teen. Not exactly what we've come to expect from the English girl who charmed the world as the frizzy-haired, ambitious Hermione. But Emma Watson is impossible to pin down—now 23, she's growing up by going back to her fantasy roots, with a new project billed as a female Game of Thrones.
Variety's Justin Kroll reports that Watson is re-teaming with Potter producer David Heyman for a Warner Bros. franchise—Warner Bros. really likes its franchises these days—called Queen of the Tearling, based on a yet to be released series of books inspired by, of all things, a speech by then-candidate Obama in 2007. The writer of Queen of the Tearling, Erika Johansen, a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, made headlines back in February when HarperCollins gave her a seven-figure deal for the trilogy, which is set to be released starting next year. Per Variety's Kroll, the story focuses on Watson's 19-year-old heroine and is set "three centuries after an environmental catastrophe when a malevolent Red Queen holds considerable power." For Watson, the project brings her back to the studio and the genre that catapulted her to fame, and after straying into an experimental phase, Tearling might just make her even more famous—and, you know, rich.