Drew Goddard Picks ‘The Martian’ As His ‘Cabin In The Woods’ Follow-Up

The upside to directing such a genre-shifting, subversive film as “Cabin in the Woods,” as Drew Goddard did, is that it provides ample experience for whatever world he’d like to tackle next. And indeed, after a string of high-profile writing gigs, the writer/director has chosen an ambitious setting and narrative for his follow-up — one that features a new type of horror previously unexplored by him.

In a move that at first recalls the Great “Deep Impact”/”Armageddon” Faceoff of ’98, Goddard has been announced to write and direct another space-bound drama, just a week after the trailer to Alfonso Cuaron‘s “Gravity” was revealed. Based on the e-book written by Andy Weir, “The Martian,” which is set up at Fox, tells a similarly-hopeless tale of solitude: an astronaut stranded on Mars, who tries to survive long enough to chart a path back to Earth.

According to The Wrap, insiders claim the project is in fact quite different from Cuaron’s film and more of a mix of “Apollo 13” and “Cast Away.” Simon Kinberg (“Elysium”) will produce the flick, which after Goddard’s involvement in massive tentpoles “Robopocalypse” and “World War Z,” might prove to be the smaller-scale, intimate antidote to those behemoths. And with the growing audience of “Cabin in the Woods” turning into more interest for Goddard’s next film, that seems like a winning combination for all involved.