Youth Fantasy Face-Off: Will Oscar Pill or The Seventh Son Become Your New Harry Potter?

Now that marketing is kicking into gear for the final half-chapter of the Harry Potter saga, fans everywhere are starting to feel the disappointment and sadness that comes with the ending of a beloved movie franchise. But you know who's feeling it even more? Producers and studio execs! For them, ending this series is like taking a huge bulldozer to a perfectly healthy money tree! So naturally, everyone's now scrambling to find the next Harry Potter. Right now, two children's fantasy series, Eli Anderson's Oscar Pill books and Joseph Delaney's The Wardstone Chronicles, are competing for the prize. But which one will triumph?

Casting has already begun on The Seventh Son, a film adaptation of the first book in the fantasy series The Wardstone Chronicles. And now, Harry Potter producer David Heyman has just picked up the rights to the French fantasy novel The Adventures of Oscar Pill, which is also part of a series.

Granted, Hollywood doesn't always operate like a Highlander movie, but enough Harry Potter wannabe's have crashed and burned (The Golden Compass, anyone?) to where it's probably safe to assume that one series will ultimately make a lot more cash than the other. Well, that is if either one succeeds. Take a look at the vital stats of each below and place your vote now for your favorite kid with special powers.

Number of Books:

·The Wardstone Chronicles: Seven, with an eighth and ninth on the way.

·Oscar Pill: Five.

The Plot:

·The Wardstone Chronicles: A young boy, the seventh son of someone who was also a seventh son, is endowed with special powers to see dark forces like witches and ghosts that others cannot. Naturally, he goes to training camp to become a "Spook," which is the name given to those who fight the dark forces.

·Oscar Pill: An ordinary teenage boy finds out that he is a member of "Medicus," which somehow allows him to actually enter human bodies. The plot involves him traveling across five worlds of the human body to find a trophy in each and move onto the next. He must fight the enemies of the Medicus, the "Pathologus," and uncover the mystery of what happened to his father, who disappeared when he was young. Here's hoping for a cameo from Martin Short.

The Special Boy:

·The Wardstone Chronicles: A thirteen-year old boy, Thomas Ward, who has always known he is supposed to train to become a Spook. However, according to his Spook master, he is the most gifted out of the previous 29 apprentices he has trained.

·Oscar Pill: Pill is a red-haired, thirteen year old boy who is courageous, but also stubborn, with a distaste for rules and authority. So basically, he's like every other thirteen year-old boy, except he can enter human bodies.

The Villain:

·The Wardstone Chronicles: Lots of different witches. Also ghosts, creatures, and other things that go bump in the night.

·Oscar Pill: The Great Master of Pathologous, who escapes from a remote prison in Siberia by hiding in a can of sardines, which a guard then eats. Wow.

The Cast:

·The Wardstone Chronicles: So far, Jeff Bridges will be playing the Spook who trains Thomas Ward, while Julianne Moore will be playing "the most sinister of the witches who uses blood magic." Sounds like fun!

·Oscar Pill: Casting hasn't started yet.