Having seen his animated The Beatles movie
Yellow Submarine axed earlier this year, director
Robert Zemeckis has been scrambling around to find a project he could direct as his long-awaited return to live-action film-making, his first since
Cast Away in 2000. Just last week he was linked to a legal drama titled
Flight with Denzel Washington but another week brings with it another potential project for Zemeckis.
Vulture are reporting that Zemeckis has entered 'serious talks' with Warner Bros. to direct
Replay, an adaptation of the late
Ken Grimwood's 1987 novel about a 40-something radio journalist dies of a heart attack in 1988, but re-awakens back in 1963, in his 18-year-old body, with the memories and accrued wisdom of the previous 25 years intact. He always dies in 1988, and then goes back to the late sixties, but each time he has the ability to make a new sets of choices, resulting in different spouses, progeny, and jobs in each life. So it's kind of time travel/parallel universes and sounds like it has more than a little resemblance to
Source Code as it mentions the lead character travels back in time more than once. It's not quite as sentimental as Zemeckis'
Back to the Future and it's not just about correcting your previous mistakes because he also has to save the life of his daughter, so it's more thriller than anything else. Add to that
Jason Smilovic, the creator of the show 'Kidnapped' has wrote the screenplay which backs that idea up. He also wrote 2006's Lucky Number Slevin. As for who could star, well
Ben Affleck met with the producers late last year to direct and possibly star before passing on the project and handing over some notes of what changes he would made. We haven't heard his name linked to the project since and I imagine he has moved on to his next directorial project -
the middle East thriller Argo, though it does give us a little insight into the kind of lead we can expect. (presumably we will see the actor as a 40 year old, whilst everyone else sees him as a teenager?). One potential casting that might come off is a fun cameo;
The project is also a case of art imitating life imitating art: Steven Spielberg executive produced Zemeckis Back to the Future movies, and during one replay" in Replay the character notices a movie thats been directed by ... Steven Spielberg. (The fictional Spielberg movie in Replay ends up leading the protagonist to his soul mate, a fellow time-jumper, and the movie's screenwriter.)
So is Robert Zemeckis about to return back to the future, again? Vulture does say this movie is more likely to happen next for Zemeckis than Flight and it's obvious he already has a huge interest in playing with time and a lot of his movies have the weight of time as a theme and indeed, last year he attached himself to
another time travel movie. Let's keep our fingers crossed it happens.