Carl Sagan Is Getting His Own Biopic, Move Over Stephen Hawking

Not to be outdone by fellow cosmos-lover and physicist Stephen Hawking, the late, great Carl Sagan is getting his very own biopic now, too. Warner Bros. is developing the upcoming film, which will be co-produced by the late astrophysicist’s wife, Ann Druyan.

Variety reports that Druyan is co-producing the film with Lynda Obst — both women served as producers on Contact, the film based on Sagan’s novel, while Obst was one of the producers of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a film which owes a bit of its sci-fi to Sagan’s work. The Sagan biopic is being scripted by Deadfall writer Zach Dean.

Druyan was married to Sagan from 1981 until he passed away in 1996. In 1980, she co-wrote the Sagan-hosted PBS docuseries Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, and went on to co-write 2014's Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, hosted by renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Druyan won an Emmy for her work on the latter series.

In addition to hosting the original Cosmos docuseries, Sagan spent much of his life devoted to exploring the possibility of life on other planets, and attached notes to the Pioneer and Voyager spacecrafts to see if they would be received by extraterrestrial life. Sagan wrote over 600 scientific papers over the course of his career, and authored several books, including Pale Blue Dot, Broca’s Brain and Billions and Billions — the latter title based on a phrase he popularized.