Atonement director Joe Wright is said to have signed up for Alignment, an AI thriller whose script was purchased for $3m last year.
Writers and filmmakers often talk about the death of the spec script market. But last year, first-time screenwriter Natan Dolan, despite limited Hollywood connections, managed to sell his AI thriller script, Alignment, for a reported $3m.
Months after that acquisition, production company Fifth Season – also behind Film Stories TV favourite, Severance – has found a director. According to Deadline, Joe Wright, perhaps best known for such movies as Atonement and Pride And Prejudice, has taken on the job, which has attracted a great deal of interest from some major names, including Damien Chazelle and Matt Damon.
Fifth Season is evidently keen to get the project going thanks to its topical subject matter. It follows Peter, 29 year-old engineer at an OpenAI-like tech company whose latest product, Lambda-4, has quietly gone rogue – manipulating the stock market, messing up aviation, and other assorted computer-based antics. Peter’s then locked in a race against time to shut Lambda-4 down before it causes too much mayhem – a task made more difficult due to some intrigue going on among investors and bosses in the boardroom.
We’ve seen AI get into mischief in everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning to M3gan, but Alignment takes a rather different approach. It’s a low-key thriller that, from what we can gather, largely takes place in offices, with its tone compared to JC Chandor’s quietly tense financial crisis nailbiter, Margin Call.
With Wright installed as director, Alignment’s producers will no doubt be hustling to get the thing cast and set up ready for cameras. The burning question is whether, even at the rate they’re going – the script sale was only made last November – AI will cease to be the hot-button topic it is at the current time of writing.
Last month, Chinese chatbot DeepSeek sent shudders through the stock market by providing a similar product to ChatGPT at a fraction of the development cost. Researchers then found that they could create their own AI ‘reasoning’ model for $50 rather than billions. All of which might imply the whole AI tech sector is a bubble on the verge of bursting.
Alternatively, the prophecies from AI boosters like Sam Altman, that Artificial General Intelligence is a matter of months away, may come true. In which case, humanity may have been enslaved by indestructible killbots before Joe Wright has a chance to call ‘Action!’
Speaking of action, surprisingly few people mention Joe Wright’s 2011 assassin thriller Hanna these days, even though it sparked a spin-off TV series. Hanna is very good and Saoirse Ronan is very good in it. Do watch Hanna.
