Doug Liman has a lot on his plate, but he’s the kind of guy that likes to be busy. He’s got the VR series “Invisible” launching this fall, a sequel to “Jumper” brewing on YouTube Red, and the YA flick “Chaos Walking.” And if that wasn’t enough, he’s putting another project on the pile.
Deadline reports that Cross Creek Pictures has snapped up sci-fi novel “Unearthed,” by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner, as a vehicle for Liman to potentially direct. Slated to be published next year, it’s described as Lara Croft meets Indiana Jones…in space. Here’s the book synopsis:
Jules Addison and Amelia Radcliffe join forces in a tomb-raiding race on a newly discovered planet to unravel the secrets of an ancient, long-extinct civilization — only to uncover a revelation that could spell the end of the human race.
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Like all YA material these days, there’s already a follow-up book planned, so it’s probably a safe bet that Cross Creek is hoping to kickstart a franchise with this. Speaking of which, let’s not forget Liman also has “Justice League Dark” somewhere in the mix of things he wants to do. And he sounds pretty pumped to deliver something completely unexpected.
“If people want conventional, they don’t come to me. It’s why doing ‘Invisible’ was like right up my alley — because how can you be conventional when there aren’t even conventions that exist? And so you know when Warner Bros. wants to sort of turn the comic book genre on its head, they call me,” Liman told IGN about the movie.
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“It’s like how do you fundamentally reinvent what people are doing? …I do treat every project as a form of a film school, ‘OK I haven’t done that genre and how am I going to do it and how am I going to do it in a way that no one’s done it before,’ so that’s, you know, I haven’t done a comic book film, and that’s — am I going to do it in a new way that’s unlike what anyone else has ever done, and come up with a couple of rules for myself of what we’re not going to do that other people do,” he added.
Bold words from Liman, and he also says the much talked about follow-up to “Edge Of Tomorrow” will “revolutionize how people make sequels.” Well, let’s hope the execution matches the ambition.
Liman’s next film, “American Made” starring Tom Cruise, opens on September 29, 2017.
