Three years ago, Tom Hanks' Playtone Productions was developing an TV series adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods for HBO . It was going to be a big production...

Six seasons have been planned, each containing 10-12 hour-long episodes, with a budget of $35-40 million per season. The first series is scheduled to hit small screens in 2013 at the earliest.

Then it was announced this past February that the project would be moving foreword with new producers - with Gaiman himself having dropped out of the project back in 2013.comes the news that Starz is developing an American Gods series with Hannibal/Pushing Daisies' Bryan Fuller, Neil Gaiman (who's now back on board), and Heroes/Kings' Michael Green. Green is also set to be the showrunner.American Gods is about a war brewing between old and new gods: the traditional gods of biblical and mythological roots from around the world steadily losing believers to an upstart pantheon of gods reflecting society’s modern love of money, technology, media, celebrity and drugs. Its protagonist, Shadow Moon, is an ex-con who becomes bodyguard and traveling partner to Mr. Wednesday, a con man, but in reality one of the older gods, on a cross-country mission to gather his forces in preparation to battle the new deities.Commented Neil Gaiman, "When you create something like American Gods, which attracts fans and obsessives and people who tattoo quotes from it on themselves or each other, and who all, tattooed or not, just care about it deeply, it's really important to pick your team carefully: you don't want to let the fans down, or the people who care and have been casting it online since the dawn of recorded history. What I love most about the team who I trust to take it out to the world, is that they are the same kind of fanatics that ’American Gods’ has attracted since the start. I haven't actually checked Bryan Fuller or Michael Green for quote tattoos, but I would not be surprised if they have them. The people at Fremantle are the kinds of people who have copies of ‘American Gods in the bottom of their backpacks after going around the world, and who press them on their friends. And the team at Starz have been quite certain that they wanted to give Shadow, Wednesday and Laura a home since they first heard that the book was out there.I can't wait to see what they do to bring the story to the widest possible audience able to cope with it."Commented Bryan Fuller, "Neil Gaiman has created the holiest of holy toy boxes with American Gods and filled it with all manner of magical thing, born of new gods and old. Michael Green and I are thrilled to crack this toy box wide open and unleash the fantastical titans of heaven and earth and Neil's vividly prolific imagination."

Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/Showrenity