Plans for a $100m Alien Nation movie reboot fell apart, and director Jeff Nichols has been giving an update on the project.
If you’ve not had the pleasure yet, then we can’t recommend the Team Deakins podcast enough. Hosted by James and Roger Deakins, they go through their contacts book and talk to people they’ve worked with across their many films. They get some fascinating stories as they do so.
One recent guest on the podcast has been director Jeff Nichols, the man behind terrific films such as Take Shelter, Midnight Special and Mud. The last film he directed was 2016’s Loving, and since then he’s been trying to bring a movie reboot of Alien Nation to the big screen.
The project was set up at 20th Century Fox, and was set to be a blockbuster release for the studio. But as Nichols and director of photography Adam Stone tell the podcast, they spent “three years building up an entire alien civilization and this set-up and all the characters. We were set to make it as our next big challenge, a $100 million studio film”.
The problem? “Disney bought Fox and killed it, which was a little soul crushing, to say the least”. The movie was dead as part of the purge of projects that saw Disney reduce the Fox development slate significantly.
This story might just have a silver lining though. Nichols revealed that he’s taken a call from the Disney, where it’s asked “if I would be interested in turning it into a series, potentially. So I have taken the script and broken it into ten episodes, and it’s under consideration right now. Who knows, the powers that be are deciding that”.
One thing’s clear: it won’t be a film anymore. You can hear the full story by checking out the Team Deakins podcast, here.
—
Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Stories Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
