Asa Butterfield offered lead role in upcoming Gavin Hood movie . . .

It isn’t known whether the 14-year-old actor has accepted the role yet.

Audiences will get to see Asa Butterfield in Hugo, Martin Scorcese’s children’s movie (no, seriously) which opens next week.

Ender’s Game will be based on sci-fi author Orson Scott Card’s classic 1985 science fiction novel of the same name which won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards.

Various directors – amongst them Wolfgang Petersen (Troy, Enemy Mine, Never-Ending Story) – have toyed with making it into a film, but it seems now that the project is going ahead with young South African director Gavin Hood of Wolverine fame in the director’s chair. (Hood also wrote the screenplay.)

Producers are Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman as well as Gigi Pritzker, Linda McDonough, Lynn Hendee, and Orson Scott Card himself.

It isn’t known when actual filming will start on the project but Summit Entertainment has already given Ender’s Game a March 15th, 2013 release date.

Here’s a summary of the book:

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race’s next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn’t make the cut–young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender’s skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers, Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.

Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender’s two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If the world survives, that is.

Ender’s Game is a bona fide science fiction classic, but to a degree its various sequels are even more interesting.