SCI-FI NERD – Leviathan: What Happened To This Great Looking Movie?

Do you remember this great looking short film from last year featuring floating space monsters swimming through clouds on an alien planet?

Ruairi Robinson, director of “Last Days on Mars,” created a three and a half minute proof of concept trailer for “Leviathan”, which shows a crew of futuristic monster hunters tracking down a whalelike creature that swims through an ocean of clouds. While it features no speaking parts, the featurette packs an incredible amount of drama, and the special effects are on par with a major movie production. In short, its very cool. My question is what happened to it?

Soon after its appearance last year, it was reported that 20th Century Fox had picked up the project, and that an impressive team of people were involved in making the trailer into a feature film. Simon Kinberg, the writer and producer of two “X-Men” movies and a creative consultant on “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” will work as a producer on the “Leviathan” movie. The director of 2015’s “Chappie,” Neill Blomkamp, will be an executive producer on the film, and Jim Uhls, who wrote the script for “Fight Club” and is credited in the proof of concept trailer, will write the screenplay.

The teaser trailer is prefaced with text explaining the premise of the story, which takes place in the early 22nd century, when humankind has achieved faster than light travel using an exotic material found in the eggs of the largest species ever discovered. As the short film so clearly demonstrates, hunting these eggs is a dangerous occupation, and most people who do it are “involuntary labor.”

I have been eagerly waiting more news about it ever since, and there has been zilch, nada about it from the usual sources. I am hoping it hasn’t fallen into the black hole also known as development hell, and will eventually see the light of day. In the meantime, here’s the short again until then. Fingers crossed for this one.