Hey Buzz, it's Woody that needs to go back to star command this time! Space nerd
Tom Hanks (did you see him on Graham Norton on Friday taking on Simon Pegg in a Star Trek quiz challenge!) has been developing a $100 million family adventure film based on the
famous 60s Mattel action figure astronaut
Major Matt Mason for the
past two years. Planned as a 3D blockbuster, the film has been setup at Universal, the studio who launched the Oscar winner into space with Apollo 13. Hanks has been working closely with Mission To Mars writer
Graham Yost,
the scribe who helped craft the Hanks produced mini-series From Earth to the Moon and now there's word of a major director who has just
entered talks for the film. Veteran
Bob Zemeckis - director of Forrest Gump and who hasn't made a live-action film himself since Hanks' Castaway, spending the past ten years working with motion capture, including the film The Polar Express that featured Hanks in every adult role! Of course Zemeckis has found himself
in talks for almost every studio picture put into development over the past six months as he searches for a movie to call his long awaited live-action return, but the fact that this is a Tom Hanks produced film (via Playtone) from the ground-up means I think this one might happen. Not as Zemeckis' next project as
we've heard recently that would appear to be the courtroom drama
Flight with
Denzel Washington as a surrogate Sulley Sullenberger. This story, a fictional one and based on a different character (Whit Whitaker) and location has been jazzed up where the pilot would be intoxicated with drugs and alcohol and he needs to hide it to stop himself losing his job and going to jail. If you cant drink and drive, you certainly cant drink and fly. That movie is expected to shoot in the fall and Hanks himself is busy with The Wachowski's
Cloud Atlas and
Maersk Alabama, Sonys adaptation of
Captain Richard Phillips story of when his ship was held hostage by Somali Pirates in 2009 that will be directed by Paul Greengrass. But Major Matt Mason could definitely be a film that would go into production next year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R99hAG0tgkg Still no word on what the storyline will be but loosely the figure worked as an astronaut on the moon and lived in a space station. The figure was popular throughout the early space race and the buildup to the first man on the moon mission but he was unloved soon after and Mattel retired the figure in the 70s. Tom Hanks as a space ranger and a toy in a family adventure space film from the man who made Back to the Future and has consistently got the best performances out of Tom Hanks? Yeah, I'm in for that.