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EXCLUSIVE: Oscar-winning scribe Dustin Lance Black has been set to script Earthquake, a big scale disaster film for Universal that is being produced by JJ Abrams, Bryan Burk and their Bad Robot banner. While Universal made the 1974 film that starred Charlton Heston, I’m told that the title and natural disaster subject is all the films share. So it is not a remake.
This puts Universal potentially in a competitive situation with New Line, which has a 3D earthquake project set up under the title San Andreas 3D.
There have been rumblings of an earthquake film from Abrams and Universal since 2008, when the project was first set up with The Omen‘s David Seltzer writing. It languished, but now the project is regaining momentum. Black won his Oscar for Milk, and followed with J. Edgar. He most recently has been adapting the Jon Krakauer book Under the Banner of Heaven at Warner Bros for Ron Howard to direct and Brian Grazer to produce through Imagine, and he scripted Barefoot Bandit for Fox. He’s currently adapting the Dark Horse graphic novel 3 Story as a directing vehicle, with Laurence Mark producing. He’s repped by CAA.
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This seems like a good fit for JJ – he stated during press interviews for Super-8 that, as a kid, he was obsessed with 1974′s “Earthquake” – and even features the poster from the original movie in a scene from Super-8 – a lot of a little kids back in the day spent hours drawing the infamous one-sheet logo – they don’t make ‘em like that anymore – but maybe they will again?
Of course it’s a remake the only question is will it be in
S E N S U R R O U N D ? If it’s not in S E N S U R R O U N D
then I won’t pay to see it even if it’s in 3-D. We demand REAL
Are you sure this is a good idea under the current anti-violence fad? After all, some deranged tectonic plate might suddenly shake a theatre showing this film. (And, no, I’m not making fun of the shooting, only the illogical reactions to it).
Why mention it at all? There’s such a thing as discretion, even when we’re only talking about exploitation films.
Well done Lindsey Weber!! Inspired writer choice.
good luck with those idiots giving bad notes at the network
- they are not strong with scripted – ughhhhh
The movie will be told in flashback as the earthquake narrates his memoirs into a dictaphone.
+1
haha. very funny and accurate. odd choice.
Hooray! Not doing it as a remake! Hooray for original minds and ideas!!!!
IS HOLLYWOOD ONLY MAKING STUPID MOVIES FOR KIDS THESE DAYS?
REALLY, WHO THE F*CK CARES ABOUT THIS CRAP!
You care enough to comment on it. I think it sounds like it could be good, but of course, i’m a JJ Abrams fan all the way so I may be biased.
If you spent more time reading and less time hitting the all-caps key, you might have noticed they hired Dustin Lance Black, who is not known as a writer of kiddie films.
Dustin is the third writer on this David Seltzer was first then John Logan worked on it so the question is what did those two writers fail to do? Hard to believe this needs another writer considering Seltzer and Logan are both excellent. Does Universal think it needs more stereotypical cliche’d characters in it like the original? Audiences don’t care the only thing they want to see is Los Angeles and San Francisco being destroyed by the Big One a 9.5 on the Richter scale quake. Why waste money paying Dustin to re-write what was already written?
sometimes figuring out the right story involves trial and error. Writing is problem solving. If we stopped at one or two writers on every script we would never had Casablanca or a million other great movies.
Shake, Shake, Shake yourself into a place with better information. Neither Seltzer nor Logan have written drafts of this project. Black is writing an original screenplay.
If there is no preachy gay subplot then Black won’t have much interest in writing it. He is one of the most overrated names in the business.
His last movies were terrible. This emperor has no clothes. Milk was rewritten and the writer refused to take the credit he deserved.
Black is a non-starter. Get back to us on who’s doing the rewrite.
Strangely, the 1974 ‘Earthquake’ really didn’t have stereotypical characters. I’m not saying the film is a nuanced character study but if you look at the people in the story – they’re all pretty damned odd: The lead character begins the film with cheating on his wife with a much younger woman but ends up dying to save his wife. The alcoholic wife manipulates her father to give her husband a promotion in order to save their marriage. A sports event promoter uses his gorgeous sister as bait to get money out of a cop. A grocery clerk lives a double life and turns out to be a mass murderer. Yikes! I have to say this much – the studio really had balls then and let people be ragged, unlikable and sometimes even interesting. Gotta love the 70′s.