It was announced in 2009, that the Wachowski Brothers had bought the rights to the novel, Cloud Atlas. It was also said that writer/director Tom Tykwer would be working on a screenplay. After that we haven’t heard much. Now after quite some time, we finally have an update on this adaptation…

CinemaBlend reports:

Tom Hanks tops the A-list of actors approached by the sibling producers to star in the film, followed closely by hot commodity James McAvoy, Gandalf himself Ian McKellen, Natalie Portman, and Halle Berry. According to The Playlist, who caught the news on Production Weekly, fans of Mitchell’s work should be able to easily place the actors with their respective roles. Cloud Atlas sounds daunting, as it spans six story lines over a millenia, but the unfilmable nature of the story is probably what drew the risk taking Wachowskis to the project.

I have not read the book. After reading the synopsis, I found myself interested in witnessing how they'll manage to pull a big screen adaptation out of this. How the story is told is really interesting; it reminded me of the storytelling in one of my favorite TV shows ever, Lost.
If the Wachowski brothers manage to get all these great actors to be in it, I'll be really interested and hyped to watch this.

Just in case, here's the plot summary of the book, thanks to Wikipedia:

The book consists of six nested stories that take us from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or watched) by the main character in the next. All stories but the last one get interrupted at some moment, and after "Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After" concludes at the center of the book, the novel "goes back" in time, "closing" each story as the book progresses in terms of pages but regresses in terms of the historical period in which the action takes place. Eventually, readers end where they started, with Adam Ewing in the Pacific Ocean, circa 1850.

Have you read this? Would you want to see this made into a film? What do you think of the cast wanted?