Since it looks like there either won’t be a Terminator 5 or, if there is one, it won’t be directed by McG, the uni-monikered director can turn his attention big time to Captain Nemo: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, his prequel/origin story to the Jules Verne classic. The film previously had a script by Justin Marks, the most hackiest of all Hollywood hack screewriters (if there’s an 80s toy or video game in development, Marks has written a script for it). Somehow the guy who wrote Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li didn’t quite get the ball to the goal, so a new writer has been brought in.
That guy is Randall Wallace, who wrote Braveheart. And Pearl Harbor. But I imagine Braveheart is the movie that McG will be talking about endlessly in the press as he slowly self-sabotages this film just as he did with Terminator Salvation*.
Wallace doesn’t have a whole lot of other credits; the dude also writes novels, so I guess he tends to focus on just what movies he wants to write, or what movies he wants to direct. He wrote and directed We Were Soldiers, for instance, and he is going to be directing the horse racing movie Secretariat this fall; Wallace will squeeze in his Captain Nemo rewrite before then. This means he won’t be doing a page one rewrite, I’m sure, but a very heavy polish.
Here’s hoping that Wallace, who has done a bunch of period films, brings something more authentic than the guy who wrote the He-Man movie.
via The Hollywood Reporter
* I was talking to a friend last night, someone who knows a thing or two, and we both agreed that while T4 isn’t a great movie it’s certainly a better movie than it gets credit for. The problem is that McG spent so long hyping it as the Dark Knight of robot war movies that the fairly innocuous adventure film he did end up making was seen as a betrayal. But I think Terminator Salvation is a better film than Transformers on literally every possible level.