Fourteen-year-old actor Asa Butterfield has been offered the starring role of Ender Wiggin in a film adaptation of Ender’s Game.

So far, author Orson Scott Card has written eleven novels and ten short stories in the Ender’s Game series. Book twelve, Shadows in Flight, is slated for publication on January 17, 2012. In the video embedded above, Card announced that Gavin Hood will serve as the director for this project. According to Deadline, Summit Entertainment plans to release the film on March 15, 2013.

Here’s more from the article: “Ender’s Game is a seminal futuristic novel that Card originated as a short story in 1977 and then turned into a 1985 book that won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and spawned a series. The storyline begins on Earth after a devastating alien attack, when gifted children are recruited by a government desperate to fight back. The kids train to fight the seemingly invincible, ruthless aliens on a hyper-realistic spaceflight/combat simulator referred to as the game. A young boy emerges as a genius strategist and the planet’s best hope to destroy the alien Formic race.”

Butterfield’s most recent film project, Oscar-winner Martin Scorsese‘s Hugo, hits theaters today. He plays the lead role in this 3-D film adaptation of Brian Selznick‘s The Invention of Hugo Cabret.