If you predicted this news then I’d like to request your help in picking my PowerBall numbers for the week. David Lowery, the director behind The Old Man and the Gun, A Ghost Story, and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, is teaming up with True Detective and Beast of No Nation director Cary Fukunaga for a TV series based on Joe Dante’s 1985 film Explorers. What the Hell!?
Deadline reports this strange but exciting duo will pair up on an Explorers TV pilot, which they will write together for one of them to direct. The original film was directed by Gremlins helmer Joe Dante, and was very much in the same vein. It starred a young Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix as sci-fi obsessed kids who build their own working spaceship and go off on wild adventures in outer space.
The new series will take the same basic plot and give it a modern spin. Hopefully it does better than Dante’s film, which was a critical and box office flop, no thanks to Paramount who seemed to not really care that much about it. The movie was rushed, and Dante always hated the cut released into theaters. Paramount TV is involved this time and we’ll see if their attitude has changed regarding the property. If it goes beyond the pilot stage we’ll have our answer.
