Universal has set release dates for two Amblin films: the Tom Hanks sci-fi movie Bios and horror flick The Turning. Amblin Entertaiment is of course the famous production company that Steve Spielberg founded with Frank Marshall and current Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy back in the 1980s. The banner remains as prolific as ever now; it only just released Spielberg's Ready Player One and has both the sequel Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Eli Roth's kid-friendly supernatural horror film The House with a Clock in its Walls arriving within the next three to four months.

Spielberg brought The Turning a whole lot of media attention earlier this year, when he visited the film's set in Ireland. A loose retelling of Henry James' classic Gothic novella The Turn of the Screw, The Turning stars Mackenzie Davis (Tully) as a young woman hired to serve as the governess for a man's nephew and niece following the death of their parents. Stranger Things and IT's Finn Wolfhard plays the man's nephew opposite The Florida Project's Brooklynn Prince as his niece.

The Turning is being directed by The Handmaid's Tale and American Gods veteran Floria Sigismondi from a script that The Conjuring series writers Carey W. and Chad Hayes co-penned with relative newcomer Jade Bartlett. Universal has now officially set The Turning to open in U.S. theaters on February 22, 2019. The film will open against the Blake Lively action/thriller Rhythm Section and arrive one week after X-Men: Dark Phoenix hits the scene.

Tom Hanks In The Da Vinci Code

Bios will arrive more than a year after The Turning on October 2, 2020. Written by relative newcomers Craig Luck (a PA on Sense8) and Ivor Powell, Bios will be the first feature film directed by frequent Game of Thrones helmsman Miguel Sapochnik since 2010's Repo Men. Hanks is starring in the movie as the last man on earth, an inventor who, facing his own death, creates a robot to take care of his beloved dog when he's gone. Bios is further being produced by Robert Zemeckis, making it a reunion for the director and his Forrest Gump, Cast Away, and The Polar Express star Hanks

Both The Turning and Bios sound like promising genre movies on paper, based on their premises and the talent involved. It's also nice to see that Amblin has some original offerings (or semi-original, in the case of The Turning) on the horizon, to go along with upcoming franchise movies like its Men in Black spinoff/reboot and Jurassic World 3 (which are scheduled for 2019 and 2021). Bios especially sounds like a great tear-jerker in the making, and it's always nice to see a new horror film with a woman at the helm a la The Turning.

MORE: Annabelle 3 is the 2019 Conjuring Universe Movie

We will bring you more details on Bios and The Turning as they become available.

Source: Universal