Screenwriter J Michael Straczynski says that the combination of Avatar and a “miffed” studio led to the shelving of a new, James Cameron-directed Forbidden Planet sci-fi movie.
Perhaps best known for his work on TV’s Babylon 5 and Clint Eastwood’s drama Changeling, screenwriter J Michael Straczynski was once assigned to write the script for a new take on the 1956 classic, Forbidden Planet.
In the works at Warner Bros in the late 2010s, the new Forbidden Planet was being overseen by Lethal Weapon and The Matrix producer Joel Silver – though little official word ever emerged, and discussion about the film appeared to cease entirely around the year 2009. In a revealing series of posts on Twitter/X, however, Straczynski has provided what might be a new insight into the production, and writes that James Cameron was once in line to direct – a detail that, to the best of this writer’s knowledge, hasn’t emerged before.
Responding to another Twitter user about the production, Straczynski wrote, “It’s maddening that right now, just sitting on a shelf at Warners, is a really solid screenplay for a FORBIDDEN PLANET movie, written by me, from a story by me and James Freaking Cameron. It’s production-ready, you can just drop it on the stage and shoot it.”
In a separate tweet, the writer added that “Jim Cameron was also going to direct” as well as co-write. According to Straczynski, Cameron then moved his attention to making Avatar – a decision that didn’t go down well with Warner Bros.
“He got pulled off into Avatar land,” Straczynski wrote, “and the studio was so miffed they just put it on the shelf and left it there.”
That, seemingly, was the end of Cameron and Straczynski’s involvement in the movie.
It’s a somewhat different story from the one that emerged in 2009, when Straczynski said that work on a Forbidden Planet screenplay had to be thrown out because its plot details had leaked online. At the time, Straczynski stated that the leak meant that he’d “decided to chuck the screenplay and start over.”
Read more: 10 classic sci-fi films of the 1950s
How all this lines up with the script being shelved by Warner Bros after Cameron’s departure isn’t clear; the director was already deep into production on Avatar by 2007, when principal photography began, and the finished movie eventually emerged in December 2009. The news that Warner Bros had bought back the rights to Forbidden Planet emerged in 2008 – after Cameron had already begun work on Avatar.
While it’s uncertain how all these dates and events line up, Straczynski was talking on the record about his concept for a new Forbidden Planet in December 2008. “It’s not a remake,” he told MTV at the time. “It’s not a reimagining. It’s not exactly a prequel. You’ll have to see it. It’s something that no one has thought of when it comes to this storyline.”
Rather than try to re-create the 1956 original’s visuals, Straczynski added that his film would feature its own futuristic look, and that he’d consulted “the nation’s best minds” as part of his research.
“[When coming] up with the Krell backstory and who they are,” he said, “I sat down with some of the nation’s best minds in astrophysics and planetary geology and AI and asked them – based on what we know now – what will a million years from now look like? The goal is to put things in there you’ve never seen before.”
Directed by Fred M Wilcox, Forbidden Planet was one of the pivotal science fiction films of the 20th century. Bankrolled for a then-sizeable $2m by MGM – a studio better known at the time for its musicals – it was an ambitious, visually spectacular sci-fi adventure. A pre-comedy-fame Leslie Nielsen leads a cast of explorers who touch down on the planet Altair IV to find out what happened to the crew of an earlier expedition. They soon meet the only survivor of that mission, Dr Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), who’s rather vague about what happened to his compatriots – and how he and his young daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) got away unscathed.
Featuring some truly iconic production design, including Robby the Robot – arguably the film’s breakout star – and a remarkable creature animated by Joshua Meador, Forbidden Planet inspired the look of Star Wars and led one Gene Roddenberry to think about writing his own sci-fi series, Star Trek.
“It does not get the love it really deserves,” filmmaker William Malone – who for about 40 years owned the original Robby the Robot – told us earlier this year. “To me, it’s probably the number one science fiction film of all time, just for the concept. 2001 [A Space Odyssey]’s a great movie, and filmmaking wise, is a better film, but conceptually, no – Forbidden Planet is above 2001. And there wouldn’t have been a Star Trek without Forbidden Planet.”
We may never know exactly how Straczynski would have re-envisioned Forbidden Planet, though a 2015 review of a script credited to the writer suggested that it was technically a prequel, following Dr Edward Morbius and his crew on their original mission to Altair IV. That draft was said to be the first chapter in a planned trilogy of films.
There’s always the possibility that Warner Bros will one day pluck Straczynski’s script back off the shelf one day, though the chances of James Cameron returning to it are small. He’s still working away in his Avatar universe – second sequel Avatar: Fire And Ash is due for release in December 2025 – and he has plans to direct a more grounded drama, Last Train From Hiroshima, at some point over the next few years.
Then there’s another on-again, off-again re-imagining of a sci-fi touchstone: 1966’s Fantastic Voyage. Cameron is a writer-producer on the long-gestating remake, which at one stage would have been directed by Roland Emmerich; when he left (later calling Cameron “overbearing”), word circulated that Guillermo del Toro might replace him.
Time will tell whether Fantastic Voyage will ever happen, or whether it’ll remain trapped in limbo like Forbidden Planet or another promising-sounding Straczynski script – an adaptation of EE ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman series of sci-fi novels, which might once have been directed by Ron Howard.
“There can be issues even when things do go into production, Straczynski writes on his Patreon page, “because many studio executives still don’t take science fiction, fantasy or horror seriously. They either think it’s a kid’s genre, or that SF is too complicated for an audience they consider little more than ambulatory meat with wallets.”
