World War II? J.J. Abrams? Supernatural monsters? If this sounds right up your alley, you won’t have that long to wait: Bad Robot’s Overlord, about a troop of soldiers battling strange monsters in the middle of a Nazi-occupied village, has landed a release date in the prime real estate of October 2018.
Making movies sounds frustrating. Say you’re screenwriter Oren Uziel, and you’ve just put the finishing touches on your latest script, an original and cerebral sci-fi project that you’re pretty proud of. You’ve sold it to J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot, and it’s gotten a big fancy distribution deal from Paramount. Everything seems to be going well, but there’s a catch — if this movie’s going to get made, it’ll have to be slightly remolded so that it can fit into the Cloverfield extended universe. Why, you may ask? Because moviegoers must be tricked into going to see good movies, and original projects become less scary when they can be clearly tied to another movie the audience already knows they like.
Fire up Facebook, break out a deck of cards, and put on some Granny’s Peach Tea; Jesse Eisenberg is coming to television. The Now You See Me star is partnering with Bad Robot for a new single-camera comedy series about “the changing American economy,” with intent to write, star and direct.
10 Cloverfield Lane managed something virtually impossible in modern Hollywood: Its plot and connection to 2008’s Cloverfield was kept a complete secret up to the day of its trailer release, and even then there was no way to know just how it connected to the previous film until people went to the theater to see it. But, now that the cat’s out of the bag, everyone is looking for possible Cloverfield connections in the next slate of Bad Robot movies coming out in the next few years. Today, we might have just found another one.
Hulu dropped a bombshell on all of us last week with news that Stephen King and J.J. Abrams would reunite for new anthology series Castle Rock, exploring the shared location of a number of King’s iconic stories. Now, the full announcement reveals new details of the 10-episode series, whose production begins later this year.