This is the sort of team-up that will either have you squealing with sheer, unadulterated joy or worrying that the apocalypse just edged a few feet closer to happening: Taylor Lautner and Michael Bay have decided to team up, and are floating a script around the studios to auction off the rights.
Bay and his Platinum Dunes bods have been aggressively targeting the Twilight heartthrob, looking to lock him into a film for the future. And now they have him attached to the mystery script, about which Deadline could only discover that it’s apparently Mr & Mrs Smith meets Wanted. So it’s about squabbling married assassins who discover that their parents were killers and part of a secret society directed by a piece of industrial machinery? Okay, so chances are it won’t be an exact crossbreed, but since no one has leaked details about the thing, we can’t say for sure. All that is known is that Jason Hall, who wrote the Ashton Kutcher/Anne Heche comedy drama Spread, was “handpicked” by the pair for the job of cranking out the script.
It’s also not known what role Bay will play: it’s more likely that he’ll produce this one rather than direct it, but then he’s also been saying that he’ll quit making Transformers movies and move on to something smaller for years too, so who knows?
The bigger question is whether Lautner has the capacity to turn into a non-Twilight-powered star. True, he has his loyal following, but he’s still largely untested as a brand on his own. The big test will come with this year’s Abduction and the planned adaptation of Incarceron, which is scheduled for release either next year or 2013.