It’s really amazing what a successful film can do for one’s status in Tinsel Town, even is said film wasn’t all that good. Louis Leterrier went from working on modestly budgeted martial arts flicks to big-time Hollywood productions (with mixed critical results) and now he’s quickly becoming a go-to director for various studio’s developing projects. Just days after signing on to helm Summit’s high-concept heist pic Now You See Me, the Frenchman has picked up another job: Universal Pictures mysteriously titled G.
On first glance I thought this was going to be a rapper-filled gangster picture, but luckily it’s a lot more intriguing than that. The studio has divulged only the most basic details about the movie, simply stating that it is an original disaster film based on an idea from producer Guymon Casady. Our friends over at Coming Soon seem to think that the title suggests a reference to the Earth’s gravitational constant and that a film dealing with that scientific principle could potentially involve that constant being altered and the dramatic effects that would result across the Earth. It’s all speculation at this point, so I won’t go further down the rabbit hole. But I will talk briefly about what this film could do for Leterrier.
He seems to be making a conscious decision to avoid properties and franchises at this point and that is the smartest thing he could do. He’s pulling a complete career 180 and navigating toward a new creative path. Both of these new projects are grounded in familiar genres but contain fresh ideas with interesting narrative possibilities. Though he was able to handle the scope of the Marvel Universe and the Greek gods in Clash, his characters suffered from a lack of focus. His new films will test his competence as a storyteller; one will not succeed without well developed characters and a concise and gripping story (Now You See Me) while the other will force him to find new ways to terrorize an audience with a never-before-seen cataclysmic event (on film, that is). If he can turn these projects into hits, we’ll have another major Hollywood player on our hands.
Source: Universal Pictures, Coming Soon
