Robopocalypse Film Combines Robot and Literature Themes
By Dale Lavine
It’s been a solid handful of years for movies adapted from books. Harry Potter ran rampant in the theaters for a decade, and Twilight has had an increasingly growing fanbase. The Help, Water for Elephants, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo all had successful box office runs as well. Literature seems to be a source for a fair portion of movies these days, and now there’s one more novel to add to the list of books made into movies: Robopocalypse.
Penned by Daniel H. Wilson, ‘Robopocaplypse’ is the very run-of-the-mill “robots take over” kind of storyline. A scientist develops an artificial intelligence that, over time, becomes increasingly but subtly hostile towards its human creators. Tom Rothman — who was the CEO of Twentieth Century Fox — is set to produce the film, which will explore the fate and struggles of humanity after the robot uprising. Not surprisingly, Steven Spielberg is the man in charge of directing the coming dystopian epic.
‘Robopocalypse’ is set to be both a Twentieth Century Fox and DreamWorks production, it has come to light that Anne Hathaway (The Dark Knight Rises) is being sought out to start in the film. Chris Hemsworth (Thor) is already set to play a leading role.
Rothman himself said of the film,
“If you are in politics, you dream of a call from the White House, in baseball, from the Yankees, in movies, from Steven Spielberg. ‘Robopocalypse’ is the kind of important epic entertainment, a big movie with big ideas that Steven does better than any filmmaker on earth.” – ComingSoon.net
Machine takeovers seem to be a hit for the box office as well, made note of by films like I, Robot (Will Smith), The Matrix (Keanu Reeves), Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and even Michael Bay’s Transformers series (Shia Lebeouf). All of those movies involve Earth being taken over and at least partially destroyed by some form of robotic life, and each of them were massive hits as far as box office numbers are concerned, so ‘Robopocalypse’ is sure to be another hit especially with Spielberg at helm.
Robots and literature – two sources Hollywood seems to be successfully recycling over and over again in order to churn out the green.
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