Westworld, from well-known sci-fi and thriller novelist Michael Crichton, will be the latest movie to be turned into a TV series come 2015, reports Engadget, with J.J. Abrams signing on to direct. HBO confirmed the news via its Twitter account, as well as a super-creepy Vine video teaser.
The series will see the return of those lifelike, creepy androids running a Western-themed futuristic adult theme park. Technical malfunctions lead to android malfunctions that turn them … well, bad, taking over like an evil virus.
While there’s no set date for the official launch of the program, it has already attracted a stellar cast, including Sir Anthony Hopkins (the show is right up his alley), Ed Harris, James Marsden, Thandie Newton, and Evan Rachel Wood.
Today’s TV world can be lucrative for Hollywood movie actors – just ask the many who have successfully crossed over, from James Spader (The Blacklist) to Kevin Bacon (The Following), and Kevin Spacey (House of Cards), just to name a few. But one issue many always face with drama programming is the dreaded kill-off – a main character gig doesn’t necessarily mean you’re immune to be being killed off before season’s end. An advantage with Westworld, however — and something which may have particularly attracted the top-notch cast — is that even if a character gets killed off, they easily come back as another one (because: robots), according to what executives have told The Hollywood Reporter.
The Westworld movie originally aired in 1973. Fun fact: it was reportedly the first feature film to use digital image processing in order to pixilate the image to look like as it might from an android’s point-of-view.
Vampires. Zombies. Lords. And Kings. Why not add humanoid robots to the list? Nice going, HBO.
