Drew Goddard

DreamWorks, Fox To Co-Finance Steven Spielberg’s ‘Robopocalypse’

Steven Spielberg’s next film is so big, it needs two studios. DreamWorks and Fox are near a deal to co-finance Robopocalypse, a Drew Goddard-scripted adaptation of the Daniel H. Wilson epic novel about the human race’s attempt to survive an apocalyptic robot uprising. I’m told that Disney will release domestically and Fox will distribute the film overseas. It will open in the U.S. on Wednesday, July 3, 2013.

Deadline broke the story that Spielberg was eyeing the novel as a directing vehicle, before he instead chose War Horse as the first film he directed for DreamWorks since Spielberg and Stacey Snider left Paramount and made a deal with Reliance and a distribution deal at Disney. We also revealed last October that he had committed to direct it. Doubleday published the book in June.

Fox and DreamWorks previously tried to get together back in 2009 on Harvey, where Spielberg was going to direct an adaptation of Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a man who befriends a six-and-a-half-foot-tall invisible rabbit. Spielberg finally withdrew from that film partly because it was so difficult to find the right actor to play Elwood P. Dowd, the character originated by James Stewart in the 1950 film. Now, the studios have a Spielberg project they can team on.