Reuniting with
Russell Crowe for Gladiator 2 (aka
Robin Hood) which is being followed up by a prequel to his much admired
Alien movie that could shoot next year - there's seemingly a motivation behind
Ridley Scott's recent decision-making to revert back to what he knows and what has proven fruitful for him in the past. Today it's been revealed the British veteran director has set his
Blade Runner screenwriter
David Webb Peoples to re-write
The Forever War, Scott's epic sci-fi movie based on
Joe Haldeman's 1974 novel that is now on it's fourth draft. It's unknown whether Peoples, an accomplished screenwriter who also wrote
Unforgiven and
Twelve Monkeys, has wrote all the drafts to date. Peoples name on the adaptation is fitting given Scott initially described the novel as "a bit of The Odyssey by way of Blade Runner, built upon a brilliant, disorienting premise'. The news was spotted by
First Showing, who saw this announcement on
Haldeman's blog;
"Scott has a script; last I heard, it was the fourth rewrite. I've talked to the writer he has good credits, like 'Unforgiven.'"
According to
AICN, the novel is;
is about elite soldiers in an interstellar war and how they deal with time dilation, a side effect of superfast space travel that causes them to age much more slowly than their planetbound friends and family. While only a few months seem to pass for the fighting men and women, decades are actually passing on Earth.
Scott has been wanting to adapt the novel for twenty years but only aggressively went after it when he secured the rights
at Fox 2000 in 2008. The novel seems to have a big fan following and its premise is way more complicated than laid out in this article.
WIKI seem to have it nailed down, if you wanna read more.
Scott is expected to shoot
Alien Harvest next year but after that his next movie could be one of at least two dozen projects, as well as anything else he might become attached to in the meantime. Those include a potential Robin Hood sequel,
The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio, that bizarre
Monopoly movie, a biopic of
Gucci, an adaptation of
Brave New World (a similar sci-fi sized epic as The Forever War),
The Kind One with Casey Affleck and so many more.
IMDB has his name listed to 23 projects. Personally - we would like to see The Forever War over any of them.