With a script penned by Cabin in the Woods scribe Drew Goddard, Chris Hemsworth, Anne Hathaway and Skyfall‘s Ben Wishaw all on board to star, and Steven Spielberg at the helm, it’s a small wonder why DreamWorks opted to postpone the director’s sci-fi adaptation Robopocalypse indefinitely with such an enticing line-up on both sides of the camera.
Alas, with a half-baked script and a spiralling production bill, Spielberg’s rendition of Daniel H. Wilson’s best-selling novel was ordered back to the drawing board, and the filmmaker has noted on multiple occasions that the project has been delayed – not cancelled.
Two years later, there’s nary a mention of the project aching into motion anytime soon, though a flurry of concept art for Robopocalypse has surfaced online, showcasing some of the menacing machines controlled by Archos – a sentient super-intelligence that has gone rogue.
Set in the near-future, Robopocalypse charts humanity’s struggle to survive in a world without technology, now that Archos has infiltrated every networked device on the globe, rallied them against their primate owners, and thrust our position on top of the proverbial food chain into jeopardy.
It’s an intriguing, if terrifying concept, and it’s clear that Spielberg’s initial pitch was just as sprawling and ambitious as the novel upon which it is based. It could be some time yet before both the director and DreamWorks working out the finer details and budgetary concerns, but we’ll keep you posted on the status of Robopocalypse as we learn more about its slow, gradual climb from the pits of development hell.
In the future, robots have been created to serve Mankind. Archos, the 14th version of an advanced Artificial Intelligence developed by the U.S. government, continuously deleted for displaying hostility towards humans, escapes from being destroyed and soon becomes a virus, downloading itself into every piece of A.I.-controlled technology in the planet, leading to a worldwide robot uprising where the humans caught in the chaos struggle to survive.
