Cameron to produce remake of ‘Sixties classic . . .

Fantastic Voyage posterJames Cameron is hard at work on the Avatar sequels so he won’t be directing this remake of the 1966 science fiction movie, Fantastic Voyage.

Instead he will be co-producing it with Jon Landau with Shawn Levy (the director of the Night at the Museum movies and the recent Real Steel starring Hugh Jackman).

In the original movie an elite team of medical and scientific specialists race to save a top government scientist who is suffering from a blood clot on the brain.

Their mission: be reduced along with their submarine-like craft to microscopic size, enter the bloodstream of the ailing scientist, and journey to the brain to perform an emergency procedure.

With only sixty minutes to complete their mission, the scientist find themselves fighting off an attack by white corpuscles, caught in a tornado-like storm in the lungs, and struggling to survive sabotage from one of their own. (Incidentally Fantastic Voyage was novelized by Isaac Asimov.)

The original film was directed by Richard Fleischer and stars Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Edmund O’Brien, and Donald Pleasance.

Cameron had the following to say about the project in an interview with Deadline:

“I gave him [Levy] my idea about how this should be turned into a love story and he’s really run with it.”

He also said that the preproduction work on the upcoming 20th Century Fox project is about three-quarters finished.

Expect the movie to employ the same special effects processes that Cameron used in Avatar.