George R.R. Martin’s superhero anthology series Wild Cards has been optioned by Syfy Films. Melinda Snodgrass, a co-creator and contributor to Wild Cards, is writing the script. Cards is pretty different from Martin’s Game of Thrones — it’s set within what can loosely be described as the “real†world, for starters. In the books, an alien bomb wipes out most of humanity, leaving two kinds of survivors. Ninety percent of people become deformed mutants called Jokers, but the other 10 percent are Aces, who retain a human appearance and develop superpowers. The Wild Cards series started in the late eighties, and since then there have been 22 volumes of stories from a dozen or so different writers, all under Martin’s guidance, but it’s not clear yet which stories exactly will make it into the movie. Hasn’t Game of Thrones taught us that sprawling, multi-volume stories packed with competing protagonists make great cable fodder? [Heat Vision/THR]