Sorely missed sci-fi auteur Andrew Niccol’s upcoming year is shaping up to be a hell of a busy one for a guy that has only directed three films since 1997. Niccol is currently prepping an upcoming script for a sci-fi film “I’m.mortal” (yes, that wacky, punny punctuation is intentional) which he will also direct, THR reports.
Niccol will once again return to the sort of social-based science-fiction of “Gattaca” and “S1m0ne” after 2005’s crime drama “Lord of War.” You can read the THR-supplied synopsis below:
The story is set in the not-too-distant future where the aging gene has been switched off. To avoid overpopulation, time has become the currency and the way people pay for luxuries and necessities. The rich can live forever, while the rest try to negotiate for their immortality. The protagonist is a poor young man who comes into a fortune of time, though too late to help his mother from dying. He ends up on the run from a corrupt police force known as “time keepers.”
To be honest, we’re kind of surprised that Niccol is being readied for the director’s chair for a project based on his own script. None of the film’s that he has directed have come to close to breaking even, not to speak of breaking a profit, during their theatrical run. He’s tried to get projects off the ground — Niccol had written the “The City That Sailed” as a potential directing vehicle for himself before he was dumped for Francis Lawrence — but it seemed that Hollywood had cooled on the director. We figured that his upcoming directing gig on Stephenie Meyer’s “The Host” would allow him to build momentum to get his own material off the ground again, but we didn’t expect it happen before that film even got in front of cameras.
According to THR’s report, industry insiders claim that the film might be Niccol’s most accessible yet. And certainly, that could be the only reason Niccol will once again be entrusted to helm a film based off his own script. Apparently, the film has shades of “Logan’s Run” and the premise of the film also mandates a relatively young cast in which all the leads will be somewhat close in age, with the script apparently a hot property for the under-25 Hollywood set. We would guess New Regency are hoping to attract someone with tween drawing power to bring some cachet to the film and put some “Twilight” sized bucks into their pockets (please, no Taylor Lautner).
The film is looking at a summer shoot which would place production before Niccol’s upcoming adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s sci-fi novel “The Host.” The production of “I’m.Mortal” also further confirms suspicions that the Orlando Bloom and Olga Kurlyenko-starring “The Cross” — a previous Niccol project that seemed to stall — has most likely been set aside for the time being.