JJ Abrams projects – whether for the big screen or television – are typically shrouded in secrecy.
However, the basic premise of the next Abrams venture, The God Particle, has already made its way to Vulture and Cinema Blend. The interesting twist? It’s being planned as a tiny budget film, a la Paranomal Activity.
We also know The God Particle is being set up at Paramount through Abrams’s shingle, Bad Robot, and the title is in reference to the Large Hadron Collider, which accelerates particles, and can create black holes.
You can probably guess the rest from here. A black hole is created that could end the world, and astronauts are watching it swallow up the earth from space. Can the earth be saved? It definitely sounds like a big event movie, a la Armageddon, but again, Paramount wants to make it low budget, in the $5 million range.
Abrams is producing, not directing, and as Cinema Blend points out, Duncan Jones made a strong sci-fi film, Moon, for around $5 million, and you have the feeling that Abrams and company can work with a minimal budget and still come up with something pretty cool. It’s also nice to see a major studio, and a major player in movies and TV like Abrams, working in a smaller direction where you can’t lose, like the old days when the average movie didn’t cost $60 million.
With the foreign market, home video, and a $5 million budget, there’s no way you can lose money, and if the movie actually turns out to be a hit, even better. If God Particle is indeed a hit, every studio will try and make a movie like it, and again, that would certainly be a very welcome trend in today’s movie biz.
