Jake Gyllenhaal may have sworn off blockbusters for close to a decade after his experience headlining Disney’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2010, a movie that earned $336 million at the box office to become the highest-grossing video game adaptation ever at the time but still lost money due to a $200 million budget, but he’s slowly edging his way back into the big budget realm.
Having ended his self-imposed exile from studio tent-poles with a well-received turn as Mysterio in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, the 40 year-old recently wrapped Michael Bay’s high concept action thriller Ambulance, which is penciled in to hit theaters next February.
The Academy Award nominee has now dived right back into the comic book genre after closing a deal to take top billing and produce Oblivion Song, based on the graphic novel series by Lorenzo De Felici and The Walking Dead‘s Robert Kirkman. The project was first announced to be in development two years ago, but suffice to say it’s just taken a massive step forward.
Oblivion Song follows Nathan Cole, a man who makes daily trips to an apocalyptic hellscape known as Oblivion, a part of Philadelphia that was lost to a cataclysmic event a decade previously, along with 300,000 residents. Universal has already teased plans for a franchise, and with seven collected editions to mine for inspiration, we could be looking at Gyllenhaal’s first-ever multi-film role should the opener hit big whenever it arrives in theaters.