Although Paranormal Activity director, Oren Peli, won’t discuss his upcoming new movie, Area 51, at all with the press, he’s obviously been talking about it to Paramount. The studio released the director’s spooky low-budget mockumentary in the US (although it was originally bought by Dreamworks when that was part of Paramount) and has now signed up to distribute Peli’s new movie in America. It’s not known exactly how much Paramount paid for the rights, although it’s probably quite a lot as they fought off four other bidders to secure the deal.
What we do know about Peli’s new film is that it’s another faux-documentary, this time with a group of friends attempting to get into the infamous Area 51, in order to find out the truth about whether the US government is doing things with aliens there, and filming their whole experience on a camcorder.
The movie cost only $5 million to make, which isn’t much in Hollywood terms, but is a lot more than the $15,000 Peli had for Paranormal Activity (although as with most micro-budget movies, a lot more was spent to get the film to cinema screens, including re-recording all the sound and filming several new endings).
Area 51 is apparently already in the can, which is quite impressive as they only started filming very recently, with Peli currrently working on editing it all together. There’s no release date yet set for the movie, although we can expect it sometime in 2010.