Twilight Zone Episode "Death Ship" Gets Movie Treatment

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Summit is moving forward with a movie called Countdown, a sci-fi action tale based on a classic “Twilight Zone” episode, and has attached screenwriter Michael Brandt to direct.

The “Twilight Zone” episode the film is based on, titled “Death Ship,” was written by featured “Twilight Zone” writer Richard Matheson (author of “I Am Legend”), who based it on his own short story published in a sci-fi magazine a number of years earlier.

If you haven’t seen this classic episode, the story revolves around a group of astronauts who land on a planet only to find a crashed spaceship and corpses that eerily resemble their own. They then must piece together where they are and whether they might in fact already be dead.

The Hollywood Reporter says Brandt will make his directorial debut with the futuristic film. Brandt said he was motivated to consider directing the film by an unlikely force: the writers strike. “I said to myself, ‘I can’t write, so let me put a directing presentation together,’ ” he said.

Brandt is currently rewriting the screenplay with his writing partner Derek Haas; it is based on an original screenplay by Stephen Gregg and Scott Burn. Brandt and Haas have collaborated on such movies as 3:10 to Yuma and 2 Fast 2 Furious, and they wrote the screenplay for the upcoming tentpole Wanted from Universal.

The movie, which Brandt said could go into production as early as late summer, is expected to cost in the $30 million range.