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Jane Austen Meets Aliens In ‘Pride and Predator’

An alien bent on human destruction is headed for the town next year in the upcoming movie, Pride and Predator.
By  · Published on February 17th, 2009

Pity the poor citizens of Jane Austen’s Longbourn, England… they’ve just recently learned of an impending zombie assault due this April (in the form of Seth Grahame-Smith’s “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”) but now a new threat looms on the horizon. An alien bent on human destruction is headed for the town next year in the upcoming movie, Pride and Predator.

I’m not kidding either. It’s in Variety, so it must be true. And it gets weirder.

The film will be produced by Elton John’s production company, Rocket Pictures. Will Clark is set to direct the film, scheduled to start filming in London later this year. Clark’s only prior directing experience is a short called The Amazing Trousers. Producer David Furnish says “It felt like a fresh and funny way to blow apart the done-to-death Jane Austen genre by literally dropping this alien into the middle of a costume drama, where he stalks and slashes to horrific effect.”

So… a couple quick thoughts. First, can they actually use the term “Predator” in the title of a film about a marauding alien from outer space? Do they not think lawyers from 20th Century Fox will have a thing or two to say about that? And second, does this not strike anyone as way too similar to Grahame-Smith’s upcoming zombie novel (due to be optioned for film) mentioned above? Two movies that put extreme genre spins on the same Austen classic at the same time? Sure, Hollywood has produced ridiculously similar films in the past… Volcano/Dante’s Peak, Armageddon/Deep Impact, Red Planet/Mission to Mars… but this seems a bit too coincidental even by those standards. My guess is someone got a sneak peak at a manuscript as it was making the rounds to publishers and/or studios. But I’m a cynic by nature, so maybe these two stories did reach the page unaware of the other’s existence. Maybe. We’ll have to save that question for Mr. Clark and his co-writers, Andrew Kemble and John Pape…

What do you think of this idea? Do the two ideas sound too similar to be a coincidence? Will you watch them both if and when they actually come out? Yeah, me too.

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Rob Hunter has been writing for Film School Rejects since before you were born, which is weird seeing as he's so damn young. He's our Chief Film Critic and Associate Editor and lists 'Broadcast News' as his favorite film of all time. Feel free to say hi if you see him on Twitter @FakeRobHunter.