"the" Ender's Game sequels? You make no distinction between, say, Ender's Shadow (good) and Shadow of the Hegemon (tedious) or between Speaker for the dead (the best of the series) and Xenocide (quite awful and very predictable)?

As for your question, I think Card started out as a playwright before switching to novels. I'm not sure, but I seem to have picked up this piece of trivia from one of his introductions.

Yes, Card does have some experience. He is a playwrite as well as a novelist.

Does Card even have any experience writing screenplays

From his biography at http://www.hatrack.com/osc/about-more.shtml [hatrack.com]

..dozens of plays and musical comedies produced in the 1960s and 70s

..supported his family primarily by writing scripts for audiotapes..

..he wrote the screenplays for animated children's videos..

So yes, he knows how to write screenplays..

From Orson Scott Card's own website [hatrack.com]:

So here's what I have to say about Serenity:

This is the kind of movie that I have always intended Ender's Game to be (though the plots are not at all similar).

And this is as good a movie as I always hoped Ender's Game would be.

And I'll tell you this right now: If Ender's Game can't be this kind of movie, and this good a movie, then I want it never to be made.

I'd rather just watch Serenity again.

For the film's final twist - that Ender has been fighting the actual war not just a simulator - to be feasible, the audience needs to understand the existence of Ansible, and the way the Dr. Device chain reaction works, without these explanations seeming like blatant clues as to the ending when they happen earlier on in the movie. In a 600 page novel you can hide these sorts of key facts in the general 'fleshing out' of the world, but by the time you trim it to a 2 phour script, then it gets difficult.

I'm worred that the book's plot holes will be shown up with great clarity - in my opinion it's never adequately explained why it has to be a kid who controls the fleet, rather than Wrackham. If the reason is video game skills, then I can see a swing to teenagers not young kids in the lead roles, which makes sense from the studio's point of view but will ruin the empathy.

I don't see the computer simulation episodes being a problem, they will simply look like PS3 games (bacause that's what they will be, there's money in tie-in games). Hollywood never bothers to extrapolate the state of the art when computers are concerned, witness the Nostromo in 'Alien' being less graphically capable than your cellphone.

On the upside of all this rewriting, the longer the movie takes to get made, the better the battle room / war scenes can be done with state of the art CGI.

Are adaptations of books, old movies and sequels all that Hollywood can produce now? Sad state for a supposedly "creative" industry.

Key word above is "supposedly". It's actually not a very creative industry*. The vast majority of TV and film writers are (to put it bluntly) talentless, literarily ignorant hacks. Good writers, no matter what they write, are invariably voracious readers, and in my experience people who go into TV and film writing often tend to be fans of TV and film rather than readers of books. I have, on more than one occasion, made reference to Apocalypse Now and its roots in Heart of Darkness while working with TV and film writers, and not only have they not only not read Heart of Darkness, but they haven't even heard of it! This being the case, it's hardly surprising that "hollywood" tends towards material based on books written by good writers-- but even then, the finished product tends to show the telltale marks of hack-butchery by the marginally literate script writers.

Sequels are just the most obvious way to exploit a previously successful idea.

* there are of course pockets of creativity in certain areas, such as cinematography, or effects design.

Card has directed a few local theatre things (which doesn't mean too too much, but he does know how to make dialogue flow).

This delay is incredible. I remember looking over an early version of the script about 5-6 years ago for a few minutes (someone who know him had a copy and I'm from his hometown). I can't remember any content, but I know it's been in the talks forever.

Just like DNF