Mortal Engines

The new animated Spidey movie had the biggest December opening for an animated film ever.

How did Peter Jackson write and produce something so ugly and boring?

In the future, cities have become roving wheeled monsters, traveling cross-country to harvest the planet’s dwindling resources, waging wars with each other and gobbling up smaller towns for fuel.

It’s been a quiet few years for New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson. After the director completed his (perhaps ill-advised) trilogy of movies based on the original The Hobbit novel, Jackson has mostly kept his focus on long-developing projects, including the sequel to 2011’s The Adventures of Tintin and his rumored adaptation of Philip Reeve’s beloved Predator Cities series. And earlier this week, Jackson shared a first look at some of the concept art from the latter film.

A new supersized project from Peter Jackson is slowly but surely making its way over the horizon: Jackson is producing a film based on Philip Reeve’s dystopian steampunk adventure book Mortal Engines, and the cast is gradually filling out. The latest addition is someone who’s become a bit of a Jackson regular — Hugo Weaving, also known as either Elrond or Agent Smith or V, depending on which kind of genre fiction you prefer, has joined the cast of the movie.

Peter Jackson’s been laying low as he’s prepared for his grand return to the director’s chair. Three years have passed since his final dalliance with the Hobbit series of films, and he’s been slowly building steam over the past few months for his next epic undertaking, Mortal Engines, an adaptation of the young adult novel series from Philip Reeve. It sounds like a typically ambitious project for Jackson, recreating the books’ colossal engine-powered mobile cities, but he’s raring and ready to go. And today brings him one step closer to an actual start of production as he ramps up his casting with three new additions — a “hey, that guy!” character actor, a musical sensation, and an unknown.

Peter Jackson, never one to shy away from ambitious literary adaptations, is back at it again with Mortal Engines, the first book in Philip Reeve’s sprawling steampunk-science fiction epic series about a dystopian world that’s home to giant cities that travel the land on wheels. Now, his film has an official holiday-friendly release date of December 14, 2018.

Peter Jackson has been pretty much out of the spotlight since his Hobbit trilogy wrapped, but he’s ready to start on his next project, and, surprise, it’s another ambitious literary adaptation. Jackson and his Lord of the Rings crew, including Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, are teaming up again to bring Philip Reeve’s four-part Mortal Engines series to the big screen.