Disney has failed to go forward on the film project, and so Universal has picked it up, along with some star power.
Oblivion has not yet gone from development to production, but it has crossed the threshold of inevitability. Normally I’m loath to call a project on track until they pick a director, and that director starts casting. That hasn’t happened yet for Oblivion, but Universal has announced that Tom Cruise is signed up for the lead role on the project which just as easily marks it as a sure thing.
We don’t always think of Tom Cruise as a genre actor, but he’s had his share of sci-fi over the years, and he tends to not only do well in the roles, but also draws a huge crowd to films which would otherwise have had a more limited audience.
Oblivion is an interesting take on the alien invasion story.
In 2015 an alien device came to earth and began killing the population and exoforming the landscape in preparation for the arrival of its masters.
The device it seems is successful, while the invasion is not, and so after 30 years of devastation, the device is attempting to reverse the damage it caused by terraforming the land, and repopulating the planet with clones of the few people who survived the original attack, the crew of a starship which was away from the planet at the time.
The story begins in this devastated, clone-filled world.
As a project, it was originally purchased by Disney, and was intended to be released with an accompanying novel.
The book is still under production by Radical Books under the name Horizons (though all the art still says Oblivion), with no word as to how the novel will tie-in with the film.
Hopefully, it’ll be used to give background story, rather than just telling the same tale, but the marketing information so far makes it sound as though the story will be concurrent with the film.
