Riddick Director Tackles Time Travel And Murder With This New Project

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

riddickFor all that humanity is good for, one of the things that we sorely lack is the ability to go back in time to right the wrongs that make our lives worse. (Electric scissors, we’ve got a handle on, though.) For his next project, Riddick franchise writer/director David Twohy will head into the future (and then the past) for the sci-fi thriller Replay. Not exactly the most memorable name, but this sounds like it could become an instant classic.

Replay centers on a man named Tyler Vaughn, who serves as a guinea pig for a quantum experiment in which he’s sent four days into the future. (It’s like watching 12 Monkeys in reverse.) Things aren’t going well for Tyler in the near future, as his son has been killed and he’s the main suspect in the murder. In another twist, the end of the day sees Tyler being brought back to the beginning of the previous day, and he uses this messed up chronology to figure out who actually killed his son on the day the experiment began. It sounds like it would be a good Outer Limits episode.

Twohy will direct from a screenplay written by Joe Gazzam, which Relativity picked up over the summer. Gazzam is an up-and-comer, currently writing the Cliffhanger remake for StudioCanal and producer Neil Moritz. He also has Sony’s thriller Shadow Run in development. Hard to gauge what kind of a story this will be at this point, and it’ll be interesting to see if Twohy puts his own screenwriting talents to work by giving the script a new pass. If not, that probably means Gazzam is worth our time. Unless the movie is a barrel of time-traveling shit.

Though his screenplays (some co-written) have been as mainstream as The Fugitive and Waterworld, Twohy’s directorial efforts have been squared away within the sci-fi and horror genres. His non-Riddick films include 1996’s Charlie Sheen-starring alien drama The Arrival, 2002’s ghost story Below, and 2009’s island thriller A Perfect Getaway. His career began with 1992’s Timescape. Remember that one?

He’s definitely qualified to tell the story happening in Replay, which has Ahmet Zappa as a producer, interestingly enough. According to Deadline, Twohy and Relativity are gearing up to get Replay into production in early 2015, so we can expect some vaguely recognizable actor to get cast as Tyler Vaughn any day now. Unless by tomorrow they’ve already cast someone yesterday, I think that’s how this movie works.