Game Of Thrones author George R.R. Martin’s 1979 short story Sandkings is being made into a Netflix movie.

Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski is teaming up with original Utopia creator Dennis Kelly on the project.

Verbinski told Collider: “One of the screenplays [I’m working on] is based on a George R.R. Martin short story called Sandkings, which is this brilliant little twisted short story that I love. And I’m working with a great writer, Dennis Kelly, who wrote the original [Utopia]… The British original series is brilliant. And Dennis is doing the adaptation, so I’m kind of excited about that.”

The plot follows a wealthy playboy named Simon Kress who collects dangerous, exotic animals. Kress stumbles across a mysterious establishment called Wo & Shade, where he purchases a terrarium filled with four colonies of creatures called sandkings, which grow to fill whatever environment they are kept in.

The sandkings eventually escape Simon’s terrarium and begin to take over his house as their hunger and his desperation intensifies.

It was previously adapted in 1995 as a TV movie starring Beau Bridges and was turned into a graphic novel in 1987 by DC Comics.

Meanwhile, Martin recently revealed he has written “hundreds of pages” of the sixth installment in his A Song Of Ice And Fire fantasy saga, The Winds Of Winter.

In a recent blog update, Martin told fans that he wrote “hundreds and hundreds of pages of The Winds of Winter in 2020. The best year I’ve had on WOW since I began it.

“Why? I don’t know. Maybe the isolation. Or maybe I just got on a roll. Sometimes I do get on a roll. I need to keep rolling, though. I still have hundreds of more pages to write to bring the novel to a satisfactory conclusion. That’s what 2021 is for, I hope.”

Meanwhile, Game Of Thrones, the hit HBO TV drama adaption of A Song Of Ice and Fire, that surpassed Martin’s original stories by the end of its fifth season, will see a prequel spinoff series House Of The Dragon.

The show, which is currently eyeing a 2022 release, will follow the rise of House Targaryen 300 years before Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys starts to fight for the throne.

Martin is also developing a sci-fi book called Roadmarks for HBO.