Michael Ferris and John Brancato have an interesting filmography to their credit including The Game and Terminator 3. They also teamed to write Terminator Salvation as well as penned Jonathan Mostow’s upcoming Surrogates. Depending on what you think of those first two films and how much you are anticipating the following two, I wonder if knowing they also wrote The Net, Catwoman and Primeval makes you think much less of them. I then wonder what you think now that Variety has announced they will be writing XXX: The Return of Xander Cage for Vin Diesel and director Rob Cohen.
If, like me, you think you are looking at a group of people that may be at the end of their Hollywood tether then we are in sync.
Ferris and Brancato are taking any kind of cred they may ultimately earn and tossing their pens into writing duty on XXX 3 continuing the story of Xander Cage (Diesel), an extreme sports enthusiast/criminal drafted by the government for a dangerous mission. Diesel stared in the original back in 2002 and was then absent from the sequel and replaced by Ice Cube. There was a short on the director’s cut of XXX showing Diesel’s character dying, but I guess that is all out the window now.
Moving on, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Spider-Man 2 and The Mummy 3) have been enlisted to write a feature film adaptation of Robotech for producers Akiva Goldsman, Chuck Roven, Tobey Maguire and Drew Crevello. Warner Bros is set to release the anime adaptation should a script ever end up working out as Lawrence Kasdan’s previous work seems to have not been up to par.
“Robotech” was a 1980s cartoon series from Harmony Gold USA and Tatsunoko Prods. It was re-edited and re-dialogued to combine three Japanese anime series to give the producers enough episodes to air as a daily syndicated series.
Next we come to Valkyrie scribe, Christopher McQuarrie, as he has signed on to write and produce a pair of United Artists projects. The first is The Monster of Florence which chronicles a true series of events from author Douglas Preston’s life. Shortly after moving his family to Italy in 2000, Preston learned that an olive grove on their property had been the scene of a brutal murder. Teaming with Italian journalist Mario Spezi, Preston began investigating the crime, which was part of a series of eight double homicides between 1968-85.
The second flick is The Champions, on which he joins writer-producer Guillermo del Toro, but to what capacity it doesn’t say. The film is based on the 1968-69 British TV series, “The Champions” following the adventures of a team of secret government agents who are rescued from a Himalayan plane crash by an advanced civilization and given superhuman abilities.
Finally, we come to writer-producer duo Brandon Camp and Mike Thompson who recently put in work on Traveling starring Jennifer Aniston and will now produce their next screenplay Choose with Katheryn Winnick set to star as a journalism grad student who attempts to track down a vengeful killer (Nicholas Tucci) with the help of her detective father (Kevin Pollak) and a shrink (Bruce Dern). Robert Legato will make his directorial debut on the project.
