A new remake of 1956’s sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet is officially in the works at Warner Bros. Read more about those plans below.
A new version of Forbidden Planet, Fred M. Wilcox’s 1956 sci-fi film, is in the works at Warner Bros, Deadline has revealed.
The film is set to be written by Brian K. Vaughan, a TV and comic-book writer who has penned several episodes of Lost as well as comic-books such as Y: The Last Man, Ex_Machina and Marvel’s Runaways. Emma Watts is in the producer’s chair and has previously worked on sci-fi films such as Avatar, Alita: Battle Angel and I, Robot.
The original film, which starred Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and Leslie Nielsen, followed the crew of a starship who set out to find out what happened to a previous expedition on the planet Altair IV. Once they get there, they discover only two survivors and a pretty huge secret that explains what happened to the rest of the crew.
Forbidden Planet was a loose interpretation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the film remains a stonecold classic of science fiction cinema.
James Cameron was once set to direct a remake of Forbidden Planet. The project was in the works at Warner Bros in the 2010s, but never materialised. J Michael Straczynski was assigned to write a script and recently took to X/Twitter to talk about what happened.
“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,” Straczynski replied to another tweet.
Cameron’s commitment to Avatar, released in 2009 with multiple sequels planned, seems to have contributed to the remake’s life cycle.
“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,” the writer noted.
Hopefully the new remake has better luck and actually makes it past the script stage. No director has been announced yet and Warner Bros. will likely want to take their time with this one to make sure they get it off the ground this time.
We’ll bring you more news on Forbidden Planet as we hear them.
