Disney sure seems to like Joseph Kosinski. Despite never having made a feature film before, they handed him the reins of Tron Legacy and now they’re teaming with him for a remake of their 1979 movie, The Black Hole, which was announced a couple of months ago.
Kosinski’s been talking to MTV about his plans for the film, saying “We’ve got a really strong idea and concept for the film. The title alone has tremendous amount of potential. We’ve got a really talented writer on it named Travis Beecham. We’re just getting started on the script in the next few months.”
The original film saw the astronauts aboard the USS Palomino come across a lost ship stuck in the gravity field of a black hole. The only person onboard is a scientist who’s in charge of an army of robots, who says the rest of the crew abandoned the ship before a planned trip through the black hole, but it turns out that this isn’t quite the truth of what happened. The Black Hole was judged a flop on its first release, but that doesn’t mean Kosinski and Disney don’t see potential.
“It won’t be a sequel like Tron.” Kosinski says, “This one will be a reimagining. For me, it would be taking ideas and iconic elements that struck me as timeless and cool and preserving them while weaving a new story around them that’s a little more 2001.”
He also talked about what he wants to keep from the original, saying, “I saw Black Hole as a little kid. What sticks out most is the robot Maximilian. The blades and the vicious killing of Anthony Perkins. That freaked me out and that’s definitely going to be an element that will be preserved. The design of the Cygnus ship is one of the most iconic spaceships ever put to film. From a conceptual point of view, we know so much more about black holes now, the crazy things that go on as you approach them due to the intense gravitational pull and the effects on time and space. All that could provide us with some really cool film if we embrace it in a hard science way.”
It certainly sounds like they’ve got some interesting ideas, although with things still in the early stages, don’t expect to see this one for a few years yet.