So now Joseph Kosinski (TRON LEGACY, OBLIVION) is closing in on the long-gestating TWILIGHT ZONE movie -- for me, this actually makes this project a lot more interesting. Kosinski's films, in addition to being visually stimulating, are well crafted and solid sci-fi...I also wonder when it says the property is being "redeveloped" if that doesn't mean a new script is being written as well.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-v ... ect-608166

Joseph Kosinski is about to enter The Twilight Zone. The Tron helmer is in negotiations to direct the big-screen redo of the sci-fi property for Warner Bros.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson Killoran are producing via their Appian Way banner, which is based at Warners.

A number of writers have taken a crack at the screenplay, including Anthony Peckham (Sherlock Holmes). The project is now being redeveloped for Kosinski. Plot details are being kept under wraps.

Created by Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone began as a TV series that ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964. Subsequent TV series were revived in 1985 and 2002. The sci-fi classic, which revolves around paranormal and futuristic storylines, also spawned a 1983 film starring John Lithgow.

Scott Bloom is executive producing the new film version.

Kosinski most recently directed the Tom Cruise starrer Oblivion for Universal. He is attached to helm a Tron sequel at Disney.

I just hope they go for the anthology format...a TZ script stretched to feature-length will play like a Shyamalan movie.

I would agree that a feature length movie would need to be an anthology of segments. But frankly, the show always worked better as a TV show, where you could just run a story for 20 minutes and call it a day. I'm happy to have the complete original series, even the year of hour-longs as some of those were quite good. And I'm happy to have the 1980s revival, as several of those were good as well, although never at the level of the original.

I was never a fan of the 1983 movie, although the Miller segment was a bravura exercise in directing. The only original segment, Landis' piece, was pointless without the ending that he killed his actors trying to shoot. And even that ending was a strange one for the Zone.

Not sure what Kosinski will do with this. Scripting original material hasn't been his strong suit - he's best at coming up with great design work for existing concepts. So this could just be another pass at the 1983 idea - taking a few episodes from the original series and restaging them.

I'm with you guys on the anthology element...I also agree with David on the '80s revival. It was a mixed bag. The big problem is that without Serling's voice the TZ stories can at times become pointless "twist" driven genre affairs. The old-school moralizing and messaging is what distinguished the old show and made it great. I hope they tap back into that, and not in the way that John Landis' terrible segment from TZ-THE MOVIE tried to.

I find Kosinski's visual work spellbinding. Certainly this promises to be a great looking film if nothing else.

Maybe they can spilt the movie into "segments" that lead into and out of each other, like the 1983 movie tried to do before the segments got restructured and scenes omitted (when "Nightmare At 20,000 Feet" was supposed to be the second segment, there was a bit with John Lithgow's stretcher getting wheeled into a hospital past Kathleen Quinlan, who was there to see her sister or something, leading into the "It's A Good Life" segment). Kind of like those pretentious "everything is connected!" dramas that flooded art house theaters around a decade ago like Magnolia, Babel, Crash, ect. I just don't see one story spread across two hours plugging into the "vibe" of the original series, where the brevity of the stories gave them their power.

I totally agree. There's nothing separating a feature length, single TZ story from a typical Shyamalan picture. I also would be much more excited about an anthology film in general -- we don't get a whole lot of them anymore.

AndyDursin wrote:I also would be much more excited about an anthology film in general -- we don't get a whole lot of them anymore.

The last good one I can think of was the overlooked Trick r Treat, which never got a wide theatrical release. Maybe anthology features never caught on because it's too much like sitting at home and watching TV for two hours, I dunno. Even Grindhouse, despite Tarantino's fanbase, was a big bomb. More of a double-feature than a real anthology, true, but with the fake trailers and intermission added in, it was close enough.

Anthology films have always been a little dicey at the box office and dramatically, with Tarantino's PULP FICTION probably the most successful both critically and financially. I remember when George Romero and Stephen King teamed up with CREEPSHOW, which is probably one of the most uneven examples I can think of-ranging from the truly awful (the "Jordy Verrill" segment with King himself [as an actor, he is a terrific writer]) to the pretty good (the E. G. Marshall "bug" segment). The '83 TZ got better as it went along (I also thought the Dan Ackroyd/Albert Brooks opening was pretty good) and Goldsmith did a masterful job scoring that film, but I think unless you have either one person writing the thing or a group of writers supervised by one it will prove to be uneven-again.

Probably the best thing they could do would be to have a bunch of writers create 7-8 different episodes all separate from each other but given a universal timeline to work with, that way Kosinski and the rest of the creative team could choose 3-4 of the best, link them together and go from there. You might have differences in writing style and tone, but that is one of the things that made the original series so great-one week very serious and possibly preachy, the next a bit lighter and maybe whimsical, and the next truly scary. You never knew where Serling and his creative team were going to go from week to week.

This talk of anthology films reminds me of my favorite: KWAIDAN.

Not sure how a TZ film would work these days. Perhaps an approach similar to films like CRASH, BABEL or LOVE ACTUALLY in which multiple storylines are going on at the same time with some sort of common thread to link them?

CLOUD ATLAS was the latest film to try this, and while I admire the idea and a lot of the execution of that film-the idea of trying to have multiple stories weave in and out like that goes back to Griffith's INTOLERANCE, which did not totally work but is still a masterpiece-the gimmickry of the casting got to be a bit much after a while (especially covering actors like Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Zhou Xun in tons of make-up).

However, I think having several self-contained stories would probably work better for a TZ film.

I don't really look at CLOUD ATLAS as an anthology film per se -- the same actors appear and reappear throughout, yes it's different time frames and characters, but to me, I don't consider it an "anthology" film like, say, TZ THE MOVIE, CREEPSHOW, etc., where each segment is a wholly different story with its own unique cast.

A series of self-contained stories is the best way to go. Whether they're linked is not a big deal because it's really just a "cute" way of tying everything together. It really wouldn't have added anything to TZ-THE MOVIE even if the discarded linking material had been used (turned out it was more trouble than it was worth), and that Aykroyd-Brooks last bit with Lithgow was a total waste. It undermined all the tension we just watched in Miller's segment -- even if it was trying to be funny, who cares?

I'd also hate to see them do something so stupid like all the various characters end up sitting in a train station waiting to find out THEY'RE REALLY DEAD upon boarding -- lol.

Self-contained with narration is the way to go...only question really is which set of pipes do they want to use?