Oren Peli and Warner Bros. Will Take On ‘Men in Black 3’ with ‘Chernobyl Diaries’ this Memorial Day Weekend

Announced only today via press release, we learn Alcon Entertainment was partnered with Warner Bros. to bring Brad Parker‘s horror-thriller Chernobyl Diaries to theaters this coming Memorial Day weekend where it will face off against Sony’s Men in Black III. The film was written and produced by Oren Peli whom you all know as the writer/director of Paranormal Activity not to mention producer of last year’s horror success Insidious and the recent television show “The River.”

As for Parker, you may not be so familiar with his name, but you are with his work. He worked as visual effects supervisor on 2010’s Let Me In and served as a digital artist on David Fincher’s Fight Club. Chernobyl Diaries marks his directorial debut.

Originally titled The Diary of Lawson Oxford, the film stars Jonathan Sadowski, Jesse McCartney, Nathan Phillips, Olivia Dudley, Ingrid Bolso Berdal, Devin Kelley and Dimitri Diatchenko and is set in the city of Prypiat that once housed the workers of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. The horror thriller follows a group of friends who, while vacationing in Europe, find themselves stranded in the abandoned city only to discover that they are not alone.

The story, of course, uses the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster as the basis of its story. The picture above comes from National Geographic detailing a kindergarten classroom in Pripyat, Ukraine where childrens toys and gas masks litter the ground 20 years after the disaster.

Warner Bros. must feel they can step in and steal some of the spotlight with Chernobyl as the Memorial Day weekend has never been a spot for horror features, but more for big budget Hollywood features, but with the success Peli has seen with most everything he touches as of late it hardly seems like a gamble.

As for Parker, there must be something to this flick as he has already lined up an untitled actioner with Paramount Pictures which will be produced by J.J. Abrams‘s Bad Robot and Let Me In director Matt Reeves. That project was announced just last month.

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