ROBOPOCALYPSE Next for Spielberg
Steven Spielberg’s two holiday movies are both based on books (War Horse and Tintin). The director is currently at work on Lincoln, based on the last section of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (S&S, 2005) starring Daniel Day Lewis and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. This week, he confirmed in an interview with Time Out London that his next movie will be Robopocalypse, based on the novel by Daniel H. Wilson (RH/Doubleday, June, 2011), a thriller set in the near future that was heavily promoted at BEA this year and landed on the NYT best seller list at #13 for one week. Spielberg signed it before it was published, based on a 100-page sample.
Spielberg describes the project to Time Out London,
It’s a movie about a global war between man and machine.I had a great time creating the future on Minority Report, and it’s a future that is coming true faster than any of us thought it would. Robopocalypse takes place in 15 or 20 years, so it’ll be another future we can relate to. It’s about the consequences of creating technologies which make our lives easier, and what happens when that technology becomes smarter than we are. It’s not the newest theme, it’s been done throughout science fiction, but it’s a theme that becomes more relevant every year.