Sunday, December 5, 2010 at 7:05PM Proyas to Produce a Film with No Script from a Book...That's Not Written
Boy, Hollywood sure has a lot of faith in author Daniel H. Wilson. First off, Steven Spielberg is planning on using his “Robopocalypse” (ridiculous name) as one of his next projects, and has been planning so since before the book even hit stores. Now, Summit Entertainment has plans to turn Wilson’s new novel, “AMP,” into a feature film with Dark City’s Alex Proyas as the producer. Thing is, Wilson hasn’t even finished writing it yet. Now that’s confidence. Or Summit is that eager to jump on Speilberg’s potential Wilson-run money train.
Just so you know: Bald Guy Proyas is on the right, Planet Earth is on the left.
Though it’s unfinished as yet, Wilson has said the story will be a sci-fi thriller, set in the near future, when technology that’s been designed to help the disabled inadvertently renders them superhuman. It’s drawing a lot of parallels to Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, hopefully with good reason. And Proyas is a pretty good choice to tackle the project (it’s likely he’ll be tapped to direct as well), though most of his projects since the aforementioned Dark City have seemingly failed to live up to that early potential. Perhaps Proyas can recapture that dim intensity we saw in his first few features (yes, I’ll include The Crow, I have to) with this new concept. He also seems to work well when he’s involved with the development of the story, as he did with Dark City, so he may run into some difficulty with an already established adaptation of Wilson’s novel, since the author plans to hire a screenwriter, and may cut the producer out of his creative process.
Does it shake the nerves a little bit that this book isn’t even written and we’re already forming a team to produce and force the project into theaters? A bit. Though, in a studio system where new ideas are usually passed over for remakes and sequels nowadays, maybe this show of faith in the Power of Wilson is a sign that the dream of originality is not entirely lost.
Reader Comments (4)
Robopocalypse is an awesome name for the kind of movie it's going to be. It's big and epic and technolgical. You have an entirely wrong take on it. And it sure beats Amp.
I didn't have any take on it, except that the name is a bit silly. I'm sure it's totally interesting, and I can't wait to hear more about it. =)
Its a big thing and the movie name deserves the thing
shut up losers.