Cloverfield director Matt Reeves has left the long in-development The Twilight Zone film at Warner Brothers and has found himself on the shortlist to helm Twentieth Century Fox’s Dawn Of The Planet Of the Apes.
Reeves’s exit from Twilight Zone is being labeled by the studio under the classic euphemistic banner of “scheduling conflicts,” but there seems to be more than that going on. Reeves has been developing the film for the studio for a year and reportedly has gone through a number of screenplay drafts that were not able to excite everyone involved enough to get the go ahead. With a number of other in-development projects on his plate, it is conceivable that he is looking to get back to actually making a movie as opposed to just trying to get one made.
But if Reeves is looking to get behind the camera in the near future, there really isn’t a better place to be than at the top of Fox’s shortlist of choices to take over directorial duties on their Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes director Rupert Wyatt recently left the sequel citing that the studio’s deadline that the film be ready for a May 23, 2014 as too little time to adequately complete the film.
Reeves has some good company on that shortlist as the studio is also considering the likes of Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy), J Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed), Rian Johnson (Looper), Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later), Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter) and Juan Antonio Bayona (The Impossible). Deadline reports that Johnson’s reps have denied that he is in consideration. I would suspect that del Toro’s participation is a bit of a longshot as he is still in post-production on the upcoming giant robots versus giant monsters pic Pacific Rim.
With the deadline for getting Dawn into production looming, I suspect that we will hearing who will actually be getting the job soon.
