J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Teams With Paramount For ‘God Particle’ & ‘Wunderkind’

Paramount has had a rough few weeks, with Sacha Baron Cohen’s “The Dictator” underperforming and their now tentpole-less summer after deciding to push back “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” by nine months. Fortunately for them, they’re still very much in the J.J. Abrams business.

Abrams' production company, Bad Robot, was behind the revitalization of two of Paramount’s ageing franchises, “Mission: Impossible” and “Star Trek,” as well as “Cloverfield” and last year’s Amblin homage, “Super 8.” In addition to the untitled action film announced earlier this year, the studio has picked up a spec script for Abrams’ production company. Titled “Wunderkind,” the story, written by Patrick Aison, is set in the '70s and follows a young Nazi hunter working for the CIA who becomes reluctantly intertwined with an older Nazi hunter working for the Mossad. It certainly sounds like a no-brainer thriller, and indeed, the minute it came on the market the trade reports that no less than four financiers were scrapping to back the project.

Meanwhile, the studio has also bought the rights to the spec script “God Particle” written by Oren Uziel (the upcoming genre mash-up “The Kitchen Sink”). The logline is as follows: “After a physics experiment with a large hadron accelerator causes the Earth to seemingly vanish completely, the terrified crew of an orbiting American space station is left floating in the middle of now-even-more-empty-space. When a European spacecraft appears on their radar, the Americans must determine whether it’s their salvation, or a harbinger of doom.” Despite the premise of an epic-sounding sci-fi movie, the plan is to shoot the whole thing for under $5 million and release it through the studio’s micro-budget division, Insurge Pictures, a la “The Devil Inside.” Too bad. [Variety/Vulture]