Anne Hathaway's fresh off a hosing stint on Saturday Night Live (read our recap) and plays a pivotal role in next month's hotly-anticipated Les Misérables musical adaptation, capping off an already-excellent year for the Dark Knight Rises star.
We've been hearing that Hathaway's next project is going to be Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Daniel H. Wilson's sci-fi book Robopocalypse, where she will appear alongside Chris Hemsworth (who's also had a great year, between The Avengers and his spinoff-worthy performance in Snow White and the Huntsman). Today, we can confirm the pair will indeed unite for the sci-fi thriller.
Spielberg is currently doing promotions for his historical biopic Lincoln (read our review) and Hathaway will likewise be touring the press junket soon, as the release date for Les Miz draws closer and closer. However, the Oscar nominee has already confirmed to Empire that she is indeed onboard for Robopocalypse, half-joking that "I believe it’s quite real, though you never want to hang your hat on anything."
Wilson's novel is structured as an oral history of the global war that breaks out when Archos - the global network of machines upon which the world depends - goes rogue and leads an attack against humanity (at a time referred to as 'Zero Hour').
Spielberg has already acknowledged the similarities to past sci-fi genre fare (The Terminator, Matrix, I, Robot, etc.), but what drew him to the project is how Wilson updates those classic themes about the dangers of AI to make them all the more relevant to our modern society. Moreover, it is expected that the script from Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, Cabin in the Woods) will mix things up further, possibly expanding (or outright changing) one of the two substantial female characters from the source material to befit someone of Hathaway's stature.
Meanwhile, Deadline reports that Hemsworth has passed on CBS' $10 million offer to portray Mitch Rapp in the adaptation of Vince Flynn's novel American Assassin (costarring Bruce Willis as Rapp's CIA mentor). Timing (or, rather, not having enough free time right now) was the deciding factor for Hemsworth, as he is currently filming the Marvel sequel Thor: The Dark World; afterwards, he will collaborate with Hathaway and Spielberg on Robopocalypse, followed by his fourth time portraying Thor onscreen in The Avengers 2.
Hathaway and Hemsworth, as mentioned before, are riding high on a wave of good buzz (thanks to their most recent film work) and that doesn't look to change in the future, especially now that the two are uniting with Spielberg. Similarly, the third actor mentioned in relation to Robopocalypse so far is Ben Whishaw, who did great work in the divisive Cloud Atlas and is also the new 'Q' in the box office-chart topping James Bond installment, Skyfall.
We'll continue to keep you up-to-date on progress for both Robopocalypse (which is scheduled to hit theaters on April 25th, 2014) and American Assassin.
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