When Columbia Pictures decided it wasn’t going forward with another Charlie’s Angels movie from director McG, the young filmmaker moved onto Warner Bros. where he was supposed to helm what eventually became Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns. At that studio, he made the wonderful We Are Marshall and the divisive Terminator Salvation. Middling returns on the latter (which cost $200 million just to produce) kept him from directing another film at WB, but 20th Century Fox welcomed him with open arms. Sometime in the next 12 months, McG will release This Means War for the studio and the brass on the lot must be happy with what they see thus far, because they just have him another lucrative deal.
Deadline reports that Fox has purchased an untitled pitch for a large scale space adventure for The Expendables co-writer David Callaham to pen and McG to produce and probably helm. There aren’t any details regarding the plot, but we do know that Fox has been getting into the sci-fi business big time after the unrivaled success of Avatar. Since James Cameron’s opus became a worldwide phenomenon, the studio has optioned Ion, a sci-fi romance with Channing Tatum attached to star and Scott Free partners Ridley and Tony to produce as well as Prometheus from Ridley and Damon Lindelof. Today’s move simply continues a business plan that keeps the studio up on current pop-culture trends while opening the doors to what could be a whole new franchise.
I was never a fan of McG’s until We Are Marshall showed me that he can tell a personal story with big themes in a Hollywood production. His tenure on the Terminator series resulted in a big, loud action movie; nothing more. If he can combine these talents and deliver a moving story with the kind of pricey visuals that I expect from a “large scale space adventure” then I’ll be excited to see what it’s all about. But with David Callaham on board, that’s a big if.
Source: Deadline
