With an Executive Producer role on Jurassic World, Steven Spielberg is having a pretty fantastic summer — and it looks like he's working to turn that success into a trend. To help him do so, he's turning back to the author who made Jurassic Park possible — Michael Crichton — and developing an adaptation of the novel Micro.
The Wrap has the scoop on this story, saying that Spielberg's DreamWorks Studios has acquired the rights to the book and that Jurassic Park/Indiana Jones/Back To The Future producer Frank Marshall is on-board to help the project get made.
The book is notable for being the last one that Michael Crichton was working on before he died — and, in fact, he didn't actually finish it. He was still in the process of putting it together when he passed away in 2008. Author Richard Preston ultimately picked up where Crichton left off, and Harper Collins published it in 2011.
Described as a thriller, Micro follows a team of graduate students who make their way to Hawaii after being hired by a "mysterious biotech company." Unfortunately, things go very wrong very fast. The fact that the protagonists wind up getting stranded out in the middle of the rainforest is bad enough, but the worst part of it is that they're first shrunk down to tiny size. (If you're afraid of insects/bugs/spiders, one can imagine that this movie will wind up being one for you to skip).
Many of you will probably be quick to say that the movie sounds like a mixture of Jurassic Park and elements of Marvel Studios' upcoming Ant-Man — and this isn't lost on the filmmakers. In fact, Steven Spielberg made the comparison himself in an official statement, saying,
"We are so pleased to have this opportunity to develop Micro. For Michael, size did matter whether it was for ‘Jurassic’s’ huge dinosaurs or ‘Micro’s’ infinitely tiny humans."
Jurassic Park and its sequels are far and away the most successful Michael Crichton adaptations to come out of Hollywood, but the truth is that the great sci-fi writer had many of his works adapted. This is a list that includes The Andromeda Strain, Sphere, Congo, The Terminal Man, and, more recently, Timeline. He is also credited with creating the television show ER, and wrote and directed 1973's Westworld.
As you might imagine, Micro is still very much in the earliest stages of development, though it will be interesting to see if it winds up getting fast-tracked thanks to the ridiculous success of Jurassic World (which has now made more than $500 million worldwide, and the fact that it already has some very big names behind it. Stay tuned for more updates as they comes in about the project.
