J.J. Abrams to make the Earth shake & tremble

By Matt Holmes / August 12, 2008

J.J. Abrams latest epic idea is an earthquake disaster movie, a movie he has setup to produce at Universal with the writer of the ORIGINAL horror classic The Omen attached to adapt. Plot and title specifics are being kept firmly under wraps but just like Cloverfield, it's expected the characters will be the main driving force of the picture and not the disaster itself. The Hollywood Reporter say the film is not a remake of Universal's own Charlton Heston/Ava Gardner highly gimmicked 1974 disaster movie Earthquake. But seen as though they brought it up, here's the trailer for that movie...

Are Earthquake movies really that interesting? For my money, they are the close sister of Volcano movies and having to sit through both Tommy Lee Jones' Volcano and Pierce Brosnan's Dante's Peak in the same year of 1997 (which ironically both had exactly the same problems) it is certainly the kind of bore fest I could do without. But Cloverfield gives me hope. Abrams is good at characterisation, as is writer Dave Seltzer. Maybe they can do here what Hitchcock did for the gimmick concept of The Birds.