Big Beach Productions
We all have to wait until June 12th to see if Jurassic World is any good, but it seems the movie’s producers are happy enough with director Colin Trevorrow’s work on the Jurassic Park sequel to collaborate with him again. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall will re-team to oversee Trevorrow’s third feature, Intelligent Life, which he is also co-writing with regular creative partner Derek Connolly.
Intelligent Life is actually a reworking of a previous idea from the duo called The Ambassador. Back in 2012, we learned of the sci-fi romance, which then seemed to be their follow-up to the indie time-travel comedy Safety Not Guaranteed. The plot saw a U.N. employee who monitors outer space for signs of life and potential extraterrestrial relations and winds up falling in love with a woman who “may” be from another world (I think that means she is). Sounded like Men in Black (which Spielberg produced) meets My Stepmother is an Alien.
How much has been changed and “reconceived” is unknown at this point, though its IMDb Pro listing has been updated with the new title yet retains the gist of that love story plot. The logical answer to the question is that now the project is just bigger and probably has more expensive effects set pieces now that guys like Spielberg and Marshall are involved. A human/E.T. love story isn’t the kind of foundation that would be completely rebuilt as something else. And it certainly fits with the report that Intelligent Life still aims for a tone similar to that of Safety.
Three years ago, we proposed Trevorrow just cast Safety’s Mark Duplass and Aubrey Plaza again as the new movie’s ambassador and alien, respectively. Now I’ve got another idea: re-team with Plaza from Safety and Chris Pratt from Jurassic World for a Parks and Recreation reunion. Yes, this is my second news post today revealing my Parks and Recreation withdrawal, but Plaza and Pratt have made a good duo over the years and there’s no reason that chemistry can’t continue on the big screen.
