Those of you who are regular readers at know we’re big fans of The Twilight Zone.
Of course, on a personal note, Rod Serling has been one of my idols for years. Plus, the show still hasn’t aged or dated one bit, and there’s so many great life lessons I’ve gained from watching the show as an impressionable young kid. (I’ve often joked that someone should write a book called Everything I Need to Know I Learned From The Twilight Zone).
So you may have also seen our recent reports about a Twilight Zone movie that’s been in the works for some time now at Warner Brothers, and at one point The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan was attached to it.
As much as I love the Twilight Zone, I certainly have mixed feelings about this for a number of reasons.
First of all, The Twilight Zone just doesn’t feel like The Twilight Zone without the late Rod Serling at the helm. There were a number of great writers who contributed for the show, but Rod was truly the heart and soul of the enterprise, it was his baby, and he was what we call “the show runner” in today’s jargon. The Twilight Zone was his vision, and when you watch the 1983 Twilight Zone movie, or the updated 80’s version of the series, it’s just not the same.
Not to mention, it’s hard to stretch a Twilight Zone style premise to feature length, which M Night Shyamalan has been trying to do with pretty much all his movies. Still, there’s hope somebody can reinvent The Twilight Zone and do something cool with it. Fortunately, the news has recently hit that another writer has been brought on to take a crack at the script at Warner Brothers.
As Variety tells us, the new writer is Joby Harold, who also helped pen the Warners film All You Need is Kill. At first the script was written by Jason Rothenberg, then Sherlock Holmes screenwriter Anthony Peckham worked on it. As Variety tells us, “Warner Bros. has been looking for a sci-fi-friendly scribe to get the script into shooting shape as the studio views the pic as a potential tentpole.”
The Twilight Zone movie is set up at Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way production, and Matt Reeves, who directed Cloverfield, is slated to helm the Twilight Zone flick if it makes it to the finish line.
