By Don Kaye, Source: Blastr.com
The new big-screen version of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone has found its director, and it’s not any of the filmmakers who were reportedly up for the job.
Deadline has revealed that Warner Bros. Pictures has chosen Matt Reeves to get behind the camera for The Twilight Zone. Reeves is known for his scary found-footage monster movie Cloverfield, as well as last year’s Let Me In, the effective remake of the brilliant Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In.
Reeves has been attached to a few other projects, including an adaptation of the epic vampire novel The Passage, a revisionist Frankenstein tale called This Dark Endeavor and a film based on the classic sci-f short story “8 O’Clock in the Morning.” Looks like The Twilight Zone will come first though: although a script has already been written by Jason Rothenberg, the plan is to get Reeves’ deal done, let him work on the screenplay himself and start production next summer.
Sounds good, but what happened to all those other directors that the studio was allegedly approaching about the movie? Nothing against Reeves, but last we heard, Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Rises), Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men), Michael Bay (Transformers) and Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) were all on the short list. In the end, Reeves may have come at a lower price than all of them, although that doesn’t mean he isn’t suited to make the movie.
As previously reported, the new Twilight Zone will not be an anthology like the 1982 movie but a single story, described by Deadline as a “big science fiction action movie with a single freestanding story that is linked to the original series mainly in that it shares that familiarly eerie feel.”
That raises another question: Why exactly is this being called The Twilight Zone? Will there be a classic Serling-like twist at the end, or a moral lesson of some kind, or is this just a way to brand an original idea with a marketable title? While you ponder that, also ponder the choice of Reeves and let us know what you think!
