Sure, there was a meaty love story within Fox’s $2.7 billion hit Avatar, but apparently someone over at the studio felt that James Cameron’s epic was actually a romance. Now they’re looking to expand on that success by pushing forward with Ion, a sci-fi romance film that the studio is looking to purchase and thinks could be another potentially huge science fiction hit.
They’ve courted Channing Tatum, and it looks as though the Dear John star will play a man who travels to different Earth’s and dimensions in order to find his reincarnated lover. Execs are using the magic word — Avatar — to describe the scope and otherworldly elements of Will Dunn’s spec script. Ridley and Tony Scott, whose production shingle Scott Free productions is based at the studio, will produce the picture.
The filmmaking duo had confidence in the script when it first made the rounds to studio’s last year. When every company passed, they helped to further develop the project before taking it back to Fox and getting Tatum interested. Now that the package is looking more viable with big names attached, Fox is seriously considering pulling the trigger.
It would be yet another foray into romance for Tatum, who helped Sony pull major profits from this February’s Dear John and will work with Rachel McAdams on the soapy tear jerker The Vow later in the year.
