Given co-owner Steven Spielberg’s connection to Michael Crichton’s work through the Jurassic Park films, and the huge success of this year’s Jurassic World, it’s perhaps not all that surprising that DreamWorks would snap up another title by the late author. The company has, in fact, bought the rights to his last novel, Micro{
The tome, which Crichton was working on when he died in 2008 (and was finished by Richard Preston before it was published in 2011), is another of his ‘what-if’ techno thrillers, this time focused on the science of miniaturisation. Micro’s story finds a group of graduate students brought to Hawaii by the lure of jobs at a mysterious biotech company, which then shrinks them down to tiny size and maroons them in the rainforest, forcing them to use their wits and know-how to survive.
"We are so pleased to have this opportunity to develop Micro," says Spielberg in a statement. "For Michael, size did matter, whether it was for Jurassic’s huge dinosaurs or Micro’s infinitely tiny humans."
DreamWorks will be hoping that Crichton’s name carries some extra weight after Universal’s Jurassic haul and will no doubt be watching how Ant-Man, with its own take on shrinking tech, performs at the box office this summer. Helping shepherd the project is another experience hand, Frank Marshall, who oversees the Jurassic movies with Spielberg and will start the search for writers and directors to start developing Micro as a movie.