Lord & Miller Directing 'Artemis' From 'The Martian' Author

For a while, it felt like Phil Lord and Chris Miller could do no wrong. The directing duo broke into movies with the surprisingly wonderful animation “Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs,” followed it up with the genuinely hilarious “21 Jump Street” (and later, its equally hilarious sequel), and then made a massive, subversive, franchise-starting hit with “The Lego Movie.” Plus they produced a couple of acclaimed TV shows too, with “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “The Last Man On Earth.”

It led to Lord & Miller landing one of the most sought-after jobs in Hollywood — directing the Han Solo-centric “Star Wars” spin-off, with the pair beginning shooting earlier this year with a killer cast including Alden Ehrenreich, Donald Glover, Emilia Clarke, Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. But then it spectacularly imploded this summer, with conflicts with the Lucasfilm machinery seeing the pair fired from the movie mid-production, an almost unprecedented move.

READ MORE: Phil Lord & Chris Miller’s ‘Han Solo’ Movie Was Too Comedic For Lucasfilm

Together with the swift cancellation of their shows “Son Of Zorn” and “Making History,” it’s probably added up to a 2017 that they’d rather forget, but the good news, given how incredibly talented the pair is, is that they haven’t landed in director’s jail for too long: they’ve already got their next directing job set up, and it’s one of the most hotly sought-after projects in town.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Lord & Miller have signed up to direct 20th Century Fox’s “Artemis,” an adaptation of the new novel by Andy Weir, the best-selling author of “The Martian.” And it sounds like the pair might be using it to scratch an itch that they didn’t quite get to do with their abortive trip to a galaxy far, far away — the plot follows Jazz, a twentysomething part-time smuggler living on a city on the moon who uncovers a conspiracy. Hmm, that reminds us oddly of another character that they might have been working on recently…

READ MORE: Report: Kathleen Kennedy Won’t Put Up With Your ‘Star Wars’ Bullsh*t

Anyway, it sounds like a slightly more serious territory than we’re used to from Lord & Miller, but, hopefully, their particular tone will be a good fit with the light touch that Weir displayed with “The Martian,” or at least a better one than the corporate vision of “Star Wars.” There’s no timeline set for the project yet, but you can get a head start by reading the novel when it’s released in November.