Amazon Making Original Sci-Fi And Fantasy Movies
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Companies offering streaming video services used to be content in their roles as distributors, but no longer. Netflix is getting ready to produce new original and last year Amazon announced its plan to jump into the film production game. The online retail giant put out a call for project proposals and received over 6,000 script and 600 movie submissions. After reviewing all the scripts and proposals, Amazon Studios has now announced its first three projects – all of which have a sci-fi and/or fantasy and/or horror slant.
The first film produced will be Touching Blue, written Scott Mullen and produced by Crazy, Stupid, Love‘s Denise di Novi. It tells the story of a young woman who can track people based on the objects they touch, but who experiences physical pain if she actually touches another person. The woman is contacted by the FBI to help investigations of a serial killer, resulting in a kind of Rogue meets Medium meets Silence of the Lambs situation.
Film number two is Children of Others, produced by Edward Saxon (Adaptation) based on a script by Barrington Smith-Seetachit that won the Studio’s Best Script Award. It sounds like a marriage of the old “alien impregnation” plot from science fiction with horror classic Rosemary’s Baby: a woman having trouble conceiving enlists assistance from a fertility clinic but, when she does get pregnant, she becomes convinced that the child is not of this world. Worse yet, she thinks her alien baby may be the first step in an invasion of Earth.
Finally, there will be Original Soldiers, based on a short film the Amazon Studios team created. Over 1,000 writers submitted pitches for the story and the company will select a screenwriter from that pool. Amazon Studios describes the project thusly: “When a new attack ship disable’s America’s all-droid army in 2035, two veterans who have stuck to the old ways must save the day one last time.” Check out Amazon’s page for the project and watch the mock-up trailers at the Amazon Studios page.
