Cameron Diaz to press Richard Kelly's Box

Richard Kelly's sophomore effort Southland Tales is now said to have been given a March 2008 release date, which will be over two and a half years from when filming began to it's eventual release. For me personally, it's got to the point now where I'm starting to lose interest for it, just like I did with The Fountain when that was pushed back time and time again. So I'm already looking ahead to Richard Kelly's next movie and the news from Variety today is thatCameron Diaz is the first cast in Kelly's horror movie The Box. The movie is based on a an episode of The Twilight Zone written by Richard Matheson and will be a PG-13 flick budgeted for $30 million for Media Rights Capital.

The story follows a troubled couple who come into the possession of a box that shoots out money each time it is pressed. As they get richer though, people start dying as the side effect of pressing the button is that someone is killed.

That synopsis above is actually of the Twilight Zone episode, so it could well be that the couple idea has been scrapped in favour of focusing on just one female. If I was advising Kelly, I would tell him to get stuck in and make as simple and coherent horror movie as possible which is less about gimmicks and more about telling a good horror story. Kelly could really do with a commercial hit here after the fiasco that is Southland Tales otherwise he's going to struggle to find work in the future. According to IMDB, this is Diaz's first horror movie ever and I'm quite interested to see what she can do in the genre.