In the Works: Living Dead VR and More

Night of the Living Dead, the “multi-platform VR experience”? As Janko Roettgers reports for Variety, the virtual reality production company Supersphere and Image Ten, the company co-founded by the late director George A. Romero, are planning to turn the 1968 horror classic into a world to run around in.

Quentin Tarantino, currently working on his project set in Los Angeles in 1969, has hatched an idea for a Star Trek movie, according to Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. “After sharing his idea with J. J. Abrams (who himself is busy prepping Star Wars Episode IX), I’ve heard the plan is to assemble a writers room of scribes who’ll hear Tarantino’s take and begin to put together a movie. If it all works out, Tarantino might direct it, with Abrams producing.” Right.

Meantime, Netflix may start streaming Alex Garland’s Annihilation overseas just “seventeen days after the film premieres in the the U.S. on February 23. . . . Garland’s follow-up to Ex-Machina stars Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, Tessa Thompson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Gina Rodriguez in a script Garland adapted from the first book in Jeff VanderMeer’s bestselling Southern Reach trilogy.”

“James Mangold is following up Logan by tackling Patty Hearst,” reports Variety’s Brent Lang. “Elle Fanning is in talks to play Hearst, the Berkeley sophomore turned unlikely counter-culture revolutionary.” Mangold’s written the screenplay with Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, the team that wrote The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) and Man on the Moon (1999) for Milos Forman, based on Jeffrey Toobin’s book, American Heiress.

The Playlist’s Kevin Jagernauth points us to Clark Collis’s Entertainment Weekly profile of Edgar Wright, who says there’s a sequel to Baby Driver in the works. “The deal is being hammered out as we speak. So, hopefully, I’m going to at least write a second one. I’ve definitely got lots of ideas. Whether it’s the next movie, I don’t know.”

For Deadline, Peter White talks with Neil Cross, creator of the Idris Elba-starring series Luther, about Hard Sun, his new six-part “pre-apocalyptic” crime drama, a possible Luther feature, and the reboot of Escape from New York he’s written that Robert Rodriguez will direct: “One of the most terrifying sentences I’ve ever heard in my life is ‘we’ve given the script to John Carpenter.’ I crawled around for three days thinking ‘oh my god’ but we got John Carpenter’s seal of approval. He approved it and that’s all I need.”

There’s a live-action Pokemon movie in the works, which I’m only mentioning here because, according to the Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit and Rebecca Ford, Ryan Reynolds has signed on to star as Detective Pikachu.

Series

“The Twilight Zone reboot at CBS All Access has officially been ordered to series,” reports Variety’s Joe Otterson.Get Out director Jordan Peele, Simon Kinberg, and Marco Ramirez “will serve as executive producers and collaborate on the premiere episode. . . . ‘Too many times this year it’s felt we were living in a twilight zone, and I can’t think of a better moment to reintroduce it to modern audiences,’ said Peele.”

Happy! showrunner Patrick Macmanus will write and executive produce a series based on Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, reports Daniel Holloway for Variety.

“Netflix has set a megabucks overall TV deal with Stranger Things producer Shawn Levy,” reports Variety’s Cynthia Littleton. “The deal, believed to run four years, calls for Levy to develop TV projects exclusively for Netflix.”

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.