Michael Bay may still be in the midst of wallowing in the success of the bombastic box-office blockbuster that is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but that doesn’t stop him from setting his eye on more projects. Dreamworks just recently (and preemptively) bought the rights to a yet-to-be-published science fiction book entitled I Am Number Four, co-written by James Frey. It is supposedly the first entry into a series of six volumes, and the adaptation is set for Bay to produce and possibly even direct.
The rights to an adaptation of I Am Number Four were shopped around at various producers and studios until it caught the eye of Bay. He liked the concept so much that he took it to Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider at Dreamworks who, after collaborating with Bay on the two Transformers movies, jumped at the chance to team up with Bay once again. It is strongly expected that Spielberg, in particular, at Dreamworks will have a heavy involvement in I Am Number Four as he did with the Transformers movies (he has an exec producer credit on both).
The story of I Am Number Four that Bay liked so much is of a group of, “nine alien teens assimilating to high school on Earth after their planet is destroyed by an enemy species. The fourth of the group discovers that the enemy is now after him on Earth.”
The story sounds like it could go either way in terms of being interesting or rather lame – no doubt it will be at most a PG-13 movie (since it’s Bay, Spielberg and Dreamworks we’re talking about here), but we have no other details about the plot to say whether or not that would be a bad thing. All I hope is (as with any movie) that it’s at least decent – we’ll have to wait for more plot details to come out before we can judge it too harshly.
I will say that if Bay is the one who ends up directing Number Four, it’ll be interesting to see how he does with a story that doesn’t necessarily suggest that there’ll be tanks, missiles, machine guns, asteroids, and giant robots hitting each other.
However, I would be shocked if he doesn’t work in all of his usual “Bay-isms” no matter what the story is…
Do you like the sound of I Am Number Four? Do you think it’s a project Bay should take on as a director?
I Am Number Four is currently in the very early development stages and doesn’t have a release date as of yet.
Source: THR
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