Producer Gale Ann Hurd (Hulk, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) has signed a deal with the SCI FI Channel to produce the six-hour miniseries, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. Based on Robinson’s best-selling novel of the same name, Red Mars chronicles the epic adventure of the first hundred colonists on Mars and their perilous mission to create a new world.

TNT’s slate of original movies for 2004 includes several genre telefilms, Variety reported. The two-hour movies will be produced for around $8 million apiece. Production start dates range from January to summer 2003, the trade paper reported. The slate includes the following film: The space-race-themed Voyage to Mars, based on the book of the same title by Laurence Bergreen.

Sidney Pink, a movie producer who pioneered 3-D feature-length movies in the 1950s, died Oct. 13 at his home in Pompano Beach, Fla., after a long illness, the Los Angeles Times reported. He was 86. In 1959, Pink co-wrote and produced The Angry Red Planet, the tale of the first expedition to Mars. The SF movie was filmed in what was advertised as a “revolutionary” process called “Cinemagic,” a printing-process technique that gave the Mars scenes a pink glow, the newspaper reported.