Well, this was extremely unexpected, but Warner Bros. is looking to remake the Michael Crichton film “Westworld” after using that material of the two-installment film franchise as a blueprint for their HBO Max series that leaned hard into the cyberpunk genre and lasted our seasons (cyberpunk much later after Crichton’s work).
Released back in 1973, the movie was sort of a proto-version of Crichton’s (wrote and directed the film) own “Jurassic Park” as technology runs amok, as human patrons (played by Richard Benjamin and James Brolin) are encouraged to embrace their hedonistic instincts to kill and screw robots in various areas in a theme park created by the company Delos, including Westworld, Medieval World, and Roman World. We mostly stick with Westworld as a rogue gunslinger robot (Yul Brenner) starts killing guests and hunting down survivors as the staff of Delos dies alongside the guests.
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That “Jurassic Park” isn’t lost on the studio, as they’ve enlisted the film’s screenwriter, David Koepp, to tackle this new iteration after recently writing “Jurassic World Rebirth” for Universal Pictures and director Gareth Edwards. Also, the report hailing from Deadline claims that a “major filmmaker is circling” but stops short of naming who that could be (let the speculation begin!).
A lesser-known sequel called “Future World” was released in 1975 by director Richard T. Heffron, which starred Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner as another nefarious plot with the robots is uncovered. There was also the 1980 CBS series “Beyond Westworld” from that would mark the last major project set in the universe before Crichton died in 2008, despite attempts to get a remake film going at WB before a pivot to a series.
The HBO show was spearheaded by creative duo Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the former of whom would end up helping Prime Video with their mega-popular video game adaptation streaming show, “Fallout,” which is already in its third season. In that version, they expanded the lore with Shogun World, allowing guests to experience feudal-era Japan, and the show eventually moved outside of the parks to explore the dystopian cyberpunk-themed human world.
Notably, Koepp had recently reunited with Steven Spielberg for his new UFO action flick “Disclosure Day” after working with the director on the first two “Jurassic Park” films, “War of the Worlds,” and “Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” His other writing credits include “Mission: Impossible,” “Spider-Man,” “Panic Room,” and “Black Bag.”
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