Home Entertainment Dreamworks adapting Michael Crichton's last novel MICRO

Dreamworks adapting Michael Crichton's last novel MICRO

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With Jurassic World currently devouring box office records like they were cowardly lawyers hiding in toilets, the works of Michael Crichton is back in fashion. It was the late author’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park that first captured a younger Steven Spielberg’s imagination, prompting him to get Universal Pictures to buy the film rights and eventually turn it into a film franchise which more than two decades later has just seen its latest installment become the fastest movie in history to reach a $1 billion at the box office.

Now Spielberg is once again dipping into the Crichton well, as THR reports that DreamWorks Studios – of which the Oscar-winning director is a co-founder – has acquired the rights to and plan to adapt Crichton’s last novel, the science thriller Micro. Crichton passed away in 2008 while still working on the novel, but it was eventually finished by popular science thriller writer Richard Preston and published in 2011 after which it would spend 20 weeks on New York Times Bestseller list. Along with the announcement, DreamWorks themselves offers this synopsis of the novel’s story:

The high-concept thriller follows a group of graduate students lured to Hawaii to work for a mysterious biotech company—only to find themselves miniaturized and cast out into the rain forest, with nothing but their scientific expertise and wits to protect them.

So basically Honey, I Shrunk The Kids by way of The Martian? Yeah, I can definitely dig it. Frank Marshall, who produced the Jurassic Park films, will be back on board to produce the movie, and you can probably expect Spielberg to also be exec producing. There’s no word on whether the director would be willing to step behind the camera himself for another Crichton movie – one can only hope, as this seems right up his alley – but Spielberg stated that “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.”

Crichton’s ex-wife Sheri, who will also act as executive producer, had this to say about the announcement:

“Michael was exhilarated, passionate and invested in ‘Micro,’ a story he spent years researching and developing. It was yet another opportunity for him to explore the clash between science and nature, as seen through the eyes of relatable characters. Michael also wrote in cinematic terms and would be so pleased to see “Micro” come to life on the big screen at DreamWorks.”

Along with Micro, DreamWorks also has the film rights to Pirate Lattitudes, another Crichton novel that was published post-humously and is a pirate adventure story that deals with a privateer hired by a Jamaican governor to raid a Spanish galleon and steal its treasure. Previous Crichton novels that have been adapted to the screen also include The Lost World, The Andromeda Strain, Sphere, Congo, Disclosure, The 13th Warrior, Rising Sun, The Great Train Robbery among others. He wrote and/or directed a few of those films as well as Westworld, Twister, Coma, Runaway and more.

Last Updated: July 1, 2015

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