Hanging out with Darren Aronofsky does your movie career no harm at all, it seems to us. Mark Heyman started out as Aronofsky's assistant; then became VP of Aronofsky's Protozoa production company; then co-wrote a small ballet film called Black Swan... Now, with a burgeoning new career as a hot screenwriter, Heyman is about to get to work on Age of Rage, an original sci-fi project from an idea by Spidey director Marc Webb.

Webb is producing, along with his (500) Days of Summer cohort Mason Novick, and Heyman's task is to put meat on the bones of an idea involving a post-apocalyptic society where all the adults are dead, leaving the kids to build a new civilisation. 

All kinds of echoes in there, from Logan's Run (where life ends at thirty) and Children of the Corn (kids kill all adults, life ends at eighteen), to Village of the Damned (creepy sci-fi kids) and Lord of the Flies (kids fend for themselves on an island, with pigs). Time will tell whether the end product is simply built out of its predecessors or manages to come up with something fresh and new. Heyman, according to THR, has a predisposition for "elevated genre". That's a new way of saying "high concept", which is a term nobody likes anymore, because it leads to ideas like werewolves on the moon.*

The busy Heyman is also knocking out Machine Man for Aronofsky to direct post-Wolverine. Whether Webb will himself get behind the camera for Age of Rage isn't yet clear: he's too busy web-slinging to make a decision at the moment.

*No, really, that's actually happening.