Disney Have Ditched The Next Film From Tron: Legacy’s Director

Unveiled at last year’s Comic-Con, Oblivion is a still-to-be published, illustrated novel cooked up from a premise by Joseph Kosinski, the sometime commercials whizz kid who directed Tron: Legacy.

Disney entered into a deal to adapt the book to a feature and set William Monahan, writer of The Departed about the task. Then, as recently as a week or two ago, we heard that Monahan had been replaced, and that a new draft was being written by Karl Gujdasek, a story editor from Dead Like Me. What’s more, the title Oblivion was being replaced and the film would now be called Horizons.

Yep, that’s how much currency the original book was packing at Disney – so little that its title could be discarded for something as asinine as Horizons.

Now Variety report that the film has been nixed altogether. Officially, Kosinski is now free to take the project to other studios. Maybe he’ll find one that didn’t see Tron: Legacy.

Variety provide the following blurb, though you might get a better idea from our previous coverage:

Book is set in a future where the Earth’s surface has been irradiated beyond recognition and the remnants of humanity live above the clouds, safe from the brutal alien Scavengers that stalk the ruins. But when surface drone repairman Jak discovers a mysterious woman in a crash-landed pod, it sets off an unstoppable chain of events that will force him to question everything he knows.

Random House still intend to publish the book this summer. Good luck with that.

You know, for what it’s worth, Kosinski is obviously a smart guy, and he has some good ideas and an understanding of how some cinematic technique works. But there’s plenty he doesn’t think through too, or at least didn’t seem to with Tron, and I can’t get enthusiastic for Oblivion at all, from what we’ve seen.