James Cameron may be Joining JMS on ‘Forbidden Planet’
Lots of Forbidden Planet buzz spread across the Internet while you were digging out from the snowstorms.
IESB broke the news that James Cameron was to meet with writer J. Michael Straczynski to discuss the project. The Latino Review reported, “I do know that Cameron has flipped for the current draft.”
The Review also confirms that the script is a prequel to the 1956 movie, picking up threads from the original’s dialogue. Warner Bros.. recently gave the script a green light with a 2010 release date pencilled in.
“I told [producer] Joel [Silver] this is how you do Forbidden Planet without pissing on the original that no one has ever thought of,” the screenwriter was quoted as saying. “When I told [the idea] to him, his eyes lit up. It’s not a remake. It’s not a reimagining. It’s not exactly a prequel. You’ll have to see it. It’s something that no one has thought of when it comes to this storyline.”
“The prologue to the script contains the following: Two ships traveled to Altair 4, a planet orbiting a star 16.7 light years from Earth. The first ship, the Bellerophon, came to explore that world. The humans on board encountered the relics of the Krell civilization for the first time and exhumed their dangerous past. The Bellerophon was never heard from again. Twenty years later, a second ship, a C-57D Starcruiser, came to investigate the disappearance of the Bellerophon and her crew,” the Review revealed.
Additionally, Straczynski has intentions of this being, what else, a trilogy. The Latino Review outlines the plan:
• Movie One tells the story of the original ship that came to Altair 4.
• Movie Two tells the story of the search for the Krell by the captain of the Bellerophon and his crew…as Diana continues to grow into something profoundly other-worldly. The search takes them beyond the limits of known space into other dimensions, passing from what’s known into what’s not.
• Movie Three tells the story of the second ship to arrive at Altair 4 to investigate what happened to the Bellerophon. They discover Morbius and his "daughter," who is desperate to get off the planet and out into the rest of the universe, where her power would nearly be god-like…a fate we are spared when Morbius sacrifices his life to keep her there and eliminate the Krell homeworld once and for all.