Paramount and Bad Robot Go On Shopping Spree, Pick Up Sci-Fi ‘God Particle’ and Nazi-Hunting…

By  · Published on June 12th, 2012

Paramount and Bad Robot Go On Shopping Spree, Pick Up Sci-Fi ‘God Particle’ and Nazi-Hunting ‘Wunderkind’

While we all eagerly await the next production from Paramount Pictures and J.J. Abrams’s Bad Robot (that would be Star Trek 2, if you’re living under a rock), the studio and the filmmaker’s production shingle have picked up not one, but two brand-new scripts from fresh screenwriters that look to fit right into their wheelhouse. Hey, it’s not everyone’s wheelhouse that includes both Nazi hunters and sci-fi movies that rely on hard-core psychics to make sense, and that’s a credit to the partnership.

First up, on the more official side of things, Paramount has sent out a press release (via Deadline Livermore) announcing their acquisition of a spec script from screenwriter Patrick Aison called Wunderkind that they will be producing alongside Bad Robot. The film is described as “an elevated two-handed action/thriller set in the 1970?s following a young Nazi hunter with the CIA and an older Nazi hunter working for the Mossad. The two become reluctantly intertwined in their hunt and shocking twists result.” Nazis! Action! Twists!

While Aison is a new name in the screenwriting world, he does come with some solid interest attached to his name already. He’s co-written the upcoming Spierig Brothers film, Echo Station, with Brad Kean and his first spec script, Takedowns, was purchased by GreenStreet Films with Kevin Rodney Sullivan attached to direct. But as cool as Aison and his Wunderkind may be, it’s the other new possible pick-up for Paramount and Bad Robot that’s wetting my whistle…

Vulture reports that they are hearing chatter that Paramount has picked up another script for Bad Robot to produce, this one from Oren Uziel, who has also penned the upcoming action-comedy The Kitchen Sink for Sony. Uziel’s film is called God Particle and its logline is endlessly intriguing. The outlet reports that the film’s plot is as such: “after a physics experiment with a large hadron accelerator causes the Earth to seemingly vanish completely, the terrified crew of an orbiting American space station is left floating in the middle of now-even-more-empty space. When a European spacecraft appears on their radar, the Americans must determine whether it’s their salvation, or a harbinger of doom.”

As ComingSoon notes, “the ‘God Particle’ is a nickname given to the hypothetical Higgs boson, a particle upon which much of our understanding of quantum physics is based. The world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, was built in Geneva, Switzerland in an attempt to prove the Higgs boson’s existence.”

Abrams is not expected to direct either project, and God Particle in particular is reportedly aiming for a $5m budget (slim by Abrams standards).