The Tracking Board brings word of a potential Ex Machina reunion today, citing that Oscar Isaac is circling a role in Alex Garland’s upcoming sci-fi horror Annihilation.
If the Star Wars: The Force Awakens alum were to put pen to paper, he’ll join a star-studded ensemble that already boasts The Hateful Eight‘s Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Natalie Portman and Jane the Virgin‘s Gina Rodriguez. At its dark and foreboding core, Annihilation focuses on a crack team of scientists – a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor – who plot course for a piece of American land known only as Area X.
After decades of research and 11 disastrous expeditions, Area X continues to perplex the world’s finest scientists, and those who have lived to tell the tale have been plagued with mental trauma and aggressive cancers. No word yet on Isaac’s role in the blood-curdling sci-fi, though Leigh, Thompson, Portman and Rodriguez will be among the brave souls journeying into Area X for better or worse.
Based on the first installment of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Paramount Pictures and producer Scott Rudin – who worked in tandem with Garland on Ex Machina – have pitched plans for a cinematic trilogy, with the logline for Annihilation describing VanderMeer’s peculiar sci-fi as so:
A team of four (a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor) set out into a place known as Area X. The area is abandoned and cut off from the rest of civilization. They are the 12th expedition. The other expeditions have been fraught with disappearances, suicides, aggressive cancers, and mental trauma.
Production on Annihilation is expected to kick into gear in the coming months, when Oscar Isaac will be looming large on the silver screen as ancient deity En Sabah Bur for Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse.
