Gore Verbinksi is moving away from pirates and cowboys and into the future. According to Deadline the director will helm a project for Sony about a driverless car race.
Steve Conrad, who wrote The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Verbinski’s The Weather Man, will write the script, which he sees as an inversion of the road trip movie. The comedic adventure focuses on a transcontinental trek between the self-driven vehicles of various software companies. Initially supposed to be a test, the companies’ competitiveness turns the run into a breakneck race from Paris to Beijing. Along for the ride are passengers with no control over their cars who attempt to seize control of the experiment.
Verbinski and Conrad’s last planned project, the North Korea-set thriller Pyongyang, would have starred Steve Carrell. After the hacking incidents last year, Sony decided to cancel the project. Before Pyongyang was cancelled, Verbinski’s last film was 2013’s The Lone Ranger, which flopped upon release.
Fittingly, the production for this film is being fast tracked. It is still untitled.
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