Eruption, a volcano thriller from the late Michael Crichton, is moving at Sony Pictures with new screenwriters now hired.
The weekend box office of Jurassic World Rebirth suggests there’s a hell of a lot of life in dinosaurs yet. And just as the success of 1993’s Jurassic Park had Hollywood studios looking at some of the author’s other work, so history is repeating itself.
In the 1990s, following Jurassic Park, the mighty Congo finally lumbered out of development hell, and the movie Rising Sun came along as well. This time, Michael Crichton is no longer with us, but the book Eruption is one of several that’s been finished posthumously. James Patterson finished the story off, and the book was released last year.
It was just over a year ago that people began to circle the film rights, and Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarheyl (the pair who made the terrific Free Solo) had signed on the dotted line to direct. They’re no longer involved with the movie though, and instead Kaz Firpo and Ryan Firpo have now been hired to write a screenplay. There’s no director involved at the moment.
Sony Pictures snapped up the book last spring, and has been developing the movie version ever since. The plot follows, as you probably could work out, a volcano. As per the blurb on the back of the book, “In this must-read thriller of 2024, a history-making volcanic eruption is about to destroy the big island of Hawaii. But a secret held for decades by the military is more terrifying than the volcano…”
Crichton had been working on the book at year or two before his death, and it’s one of several of his works published in tandem with another author since he passed. Sony, looking at the box office numbers for Jurassic World Rebirth, will presumably be keen to get this moving relatively quickly.
More as we hear it…
