Bad Robot and Paramount pulled the rug out from underneath us all by unveiling that 10 Cloverfield Lane, the quasi-sequel to Matt Reeves’ 2008 creature freature, would creep into theaters next month. But there’s another low-budget sci-fi simmering in development at Bad Robot, and that is Julius Onah’s new feature God Particle.
Having welcomed aboard Star Trek Beyond scribe Doug Jung before the turn of the year, the studio has now officially locked in God Particle for a release on February 24, 2017.
Outside of Onah and Jung, there’s no word of casting for Bad Robot’s futuristic sci-fi at the time of writing, though we understand the latter was drafted in to rewrite a script originally pitched by Freaks of Nature and 22 Jump Street scribe, Oren Uziel.
In physics, God Particle is the evocative moniker given to the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that gives mass to other particles. Over the past half-decade or so, the Higgs particle has become the subject of painstaking research often carried out at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider. There, subatomic particles are crammed into a colossal particle accelerator and beamed close to the speed of light, allowing physicists to analyze how these elementary objects relate to theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Head-scratching stuff, no doubt, but particle physics will only feature in Bad Robot’s film insofar as God Particle will revolve around an American space crew who, after jump-starting a particle accelerator, may have inadvertently caused a black hole to destroy planet Earth. Cast adrift in the inky blackness of space, things take a turn for the weird when the astronauts happen across traces of another ship.
God Particle has set sights on a February 24, 2017 release date, and we can hardly wait to see how Onah’s long-gestating thriller pans out. Star Trek Beyond, meanwhile, will zip into theaters in time for July 22, 2016.
