The most fun headlines in the industry trade papers are the ones that sound like some executive huffed a whole bunch of glue, jammed his hand in a bag full of slips of paper, and pulled out four names at random. It is from this Mad Libs school of showbiz dealmaking that today’s most baffling, unlikely team-up has arrived.

Deadline ran the exclusive last night that a new sci-fi project called Deeper (one of the rare film titles that doubles as its own porn parody name) would unite the impossible dream team of wondrous woman Gal Gadot, former Burnt star Bradley Cooper, screenwriting enfant terrible Max Landis, and Hungarian festival favorite Kornel Mundruczo. If you feel like you just downed a fistful of crazy pills, take solace in the assurance that you’re not losing your mind, sci-fi just acquaints one with awfully strange bedfellows. The film is a dramatic adventure about a disgraced astronaut plumbing the lowest known point on Earth via a newly discovered oceanic trench. While I am curious to learn what exactly would make an astronaut disgraced (I’m thinking Flight, in space!) and whether he’s aware that oceans are not where astronauts generally go, the rest of this project makes a cockeyed sort of sense.

Bradley Cooper and Gal Gadot are A-listers, so finding them in a big expensive sci-fi picture doesn’t register as odd. And conceptually shaky genre scripts are practically Landis the Younger’s stock and trade — Bright comes to Netflix this December! Mundruczo is definitely the black sheep of the bunch, esteemed worldwide for his social resonant critiques of Eastern European political doctrines. Accredit this, then, to his pivot into sci-fi for the recent, critically dissed Jupiter’s Moon that played at Cannes this past May. It doesn’t matter your pedigree on the world festival circuit; once you go sci-fi, the checks start rolling in.

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