Start the Countdown

The old TWILIGHT ZONE series generated a seemingly bottomless supply of fantastic enduring sci-fi stories… but looking back at them from the 21st century, they seem so musty and monochromatic. Time to inject a bit of CGI and zippy color!

The not-quite-classic episode “Death Ship” is getting the feature upgrade courtesy of 3:10 TO YUMA rewriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, who partially atoned for 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS with that excellent western (though their names are also all over the scripts for WANTED and THE A-TEAM, so we’ll see how the jury ultimately decides). Brandt will make his directing debut on the extended version, which will go by the title COUNTDOWN.

The original mortality mystery was penned by Richard Matheson (I AM LEGEND) and starred Jack Klugman and Ross Martin as part of a space exploration crew who land on a distant planet and discover a crashed ship with dead duplicates of themselves. Brandt describes his vision for the new movie as a “giant puzzle”, hopefully without the forced Shyamalan twist.