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Almost nobody would’ve expected Ava DuVernay to become a leading fantasy filmmaker, yet the director’s post-Selma path has been littered with one such project after the other. Following offers for Black Panther and word of an Amblin-backed, Lupita Nyong’o-starring sci-fi tale comes, from Deadline, news that she’s been tapped by Disney adapt A Wrinkle in Time, that perennial classic of YA sci-fi literature.

If you attended elementary school in an English-speaking country, you’ll have at least seen Madeleine L’Engle‘s book on a library shelf at some point or another. That ubiquity betrays, I think, the oddity of this story, in which a brother-sister pairing (as well as a friend from school) travel through space, dimensions, and across numerous planets, to find their missing scientist father. Adapted properly, A Wrinkle in Time would make for a massive-scale and visually overwhelming epic — no small order, even for a talent as acclaimed as DuVernay.

ciro guerraIn unexpectedly similar news, Deadline also tell us Ciro Guerra will follow the Oscar-nominated, black-and-white Colombian drama Embrace of the Serpent with The Detainee, a sci-fi dystopia-set actioner that Thunder Road Pictures and Film House Germany hope will become “a Hunger Games for adults.”

Odd, and yet the basic synopsis, per Amazon, sounds not entirely removed from the political and historical underpinnings of Guerra’s drama — or so I’m left to surmise when wondering how this transition took place. As it says:

The Island is a place of hopelessness. The Island is death. And it is to this place that all the elderly and infirm are shipped, the scapegoats for the collapse of society. There’s no escape, not from the punishment satellites that deliver instant judgment for any crime–including escape attempts–and not from the demons that come on foggy nights, when the satellites are all but blind. But when one of the Island’s inhabitants, the aging “Big Guy” Clancy, finds a network of tunnels beneath the waste, there is suddenly hope–for love, for escape, and for the chance to fight back.

Finally, there’s news (yet again from Deadline) that Demián Bichir (The Hateful Eight, A Better Life) has been added to the cast of Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus sequel / Alien prequel Alien: Covenant. Nothing about the role is known, though news tells us he’ll be among a cast that includes Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, and, somehow, Danny McBride. (Noomi Rapace is listed in the linked-to story, though all sources have indicated she won’t be returning.) As scripted by Michael Green, John Logan, and Jack Paglen, it follows the crew of a ship, Covenant, who find a planet occupied only by Fassbender’s android, David.

Alien: Covenant will open on October 6, 2017.

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