Here’s some news to gladden the heart of anyone worried that we’d lost Robert Zemeckis to performance capture ‘toons forever: it would seem that he’s combining an old passion, time travel, with the opportunity to get back into the world of fully live-action filmmaking for Timeless.
There are few details of the plot yet, but we do know it’s being written by Mike Thompson (who penned** Love Happens** and Dragonfly) and is planned as a major event film, most likely for Warners Bros. That he’s considering shifting studios is not a big surprise, since Disney shut down the animation facility he owned, ImageMovers Digital, earlier in the year.
Let’s not forget that Zemeckis was the director behind the Back to the Future trilogy, which makes him solidly qualified to dabble in shifting time periods again. (For those who are happily re-visiting the first film thanks to its 25th anniversary re-release, we’d offer Empire**’s excellent oral history, which is now online at this very site).
And what of this Superman talk you say? As of right now, it’s nothing more than a throwaway line in Deadline’s story about the new movie, with “rumours” he’s been considering the idea of Supes. But seeing as just about every director in town in being considered (though we bet Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg’s phones have not been buzzing with calls from Chris Nolan), it’s no surprise that the slightest interest from such a big name as Zemeckis would be news.
For right now, however, he's still hard at work on his current 3D animated pic, a new version of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, due to dock in 2012.