Said to be a mix of Top Gun and Back To The Future, T-Minus will be an expensive-sounding action thriller based on a Philip K Dick short story. Michael B Jordan will co-produce.
Michael B Jordan, who’s currently working with Ryan Coogler on his currently untitled horror movie, now has another major project in the works. Called T-Minus, it’ll be produced by Jordan through his company, Outlier Society, in partnership with Amazon MGM Studios.
The script will be co-written by Drew Pearce, who wrote the upcoming The Fall Guy, and Nick Cuse, writer of TV’s Watchmen and Masters Of The Air.
What’s really intriguing about T-Minus – for this writer at least – is that it’s based on a Philip K Dick short story, A Little Something For Us Tempunauts.
First published in 1974, it’s about three time travellers (the Tempunauts of the title) whose mission to journey 100 years into the future goes wrong. Instead, they end up stuck in a time loop in which they’re doomed to relive the same week over and over again – unless they can find some means of escaping it.
Deadline reports that this brief story is being blown up into an “elevated piece with major tentpole potential” and describe Pearce and Cuse’s script as “Top Gun meets Back To The Future with a Philip K Dick twist.”
Assuming it happens, T-Minus will therefore follow a long line of Philip K Dick stories blown up into expensive – and sometimes brilliant – Hollywood films. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was based on Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep; Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall turned We Can Remember It For You Wholesale into an unforgettable sci-fi vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger; Steven Spielberg expanded Minority Report into a futuristic thrill-ride for Tom Cruise. We probably shouldn’t dwell too much on John Woo’s Paycheck, though.
It sounds as though it’s early days for T-Minus, with no director or cast announced – it’d be quite surprising if Jordan wasn’t playing one of those time travellers, though, wouldn’t it?
More on this as we get it.