WB Bets Big On Sci-fi, Triple Downs On Goyer/Cassutt Novel Adaptations

Man, there are times I totally don't get how the entertainment industry works. Take book-to-film adaptations. Usually a novel only makes it to the big screen when its contents have reached a sort of critical mass in pop culture and it gets folded into the zeitgeist. Not so if your name is David Goyer or Michael Cassutt. According to Deadline, this pair inked a seven-figure deal Friday with Warner Bros. to write a sci-fi novel trilogy before turning around and adapting them for the screen. Why not just skip the cumbersome publishing process and only write screenplays? When one of you wrote the screenplays for Dark City, Blade and Death Warrant (a tour de force!) the normal rules simply do not apply. 
 
Goyer and Cassutt's novels already have names--Heaven's Shadow, Heaven's War and Heaven's Fall--and will add to the ever-higher pile of "man meets alien, alien meets man, alien clobbers man" invasion plots floating around Hollywood at the moment. The plot of the first book sounds like a cross between Independence Day and Arthur C. Clarke's classic Rendezvous with Rama in that a massive unknown object is detected inside the solar system and a crew of astronauts is dispatched to intercept, only to find the inhabitants hostile. (In Clarke's novel, though, the inhabitants were ambivalent.) Honestly, as a prolific reader of sci-fi, that all sounds dull as dishwater. Gentlemen, add some tie-in to the architects of Stonehenge, flesh eating "grey goo" and our only hope for survival being a cadre of bikini car wash workers and I'm sold.