Yesterday was very nearly a perfect day for Steven Spielberg. After a number of tough years, he earned a whopping 12 Academy Award nominations for Lincoln. The only fly in the soup was that Robopocalypse, the big budget action flick he'd been developing, seemingly fell apart.
Already slotted for an April 2014 release, the film was based on Daniel H. Wilson's novel about a robot uprising led by an artificial intelligence. Chris Hemsworth, Ben Whishaw, and Anne Hathaway were set to star, but it was put on indefinite hiatus because the script wasn't ready and was "too expensive to produce". It was beginning to sound like the same story we'd heard about other pricey projects that studios had killed off, but in a conversation with EW Spielberg insists the film isn't dead. It's just being retooled.
Spielberg: “We found that the film was costing a lot of money and I found a better way to tell the story more economically but also much more personally. I found the personal way into Robopocalypse, and so I just told everybody to go find other jobs, I’m starting on a new script and we’ll have this movie back on its feet soon.”
He expects the delay to last about six to eight months while he works on the story, and reading between the lines it doesn't sound like previous writer Drew Goddard(The Cabin in the Woods) is going to be involved. Hopefully when everything's ready to go he'll be able to hold on to the cast.
