Steven Spielberg likes robots. He brought the world A.I., is the executive producer of the Transformers franchise and has also shepherded upcoming Hugh Jackman/robo-boxing pic **Real Steel **to the screen. And since he’s been watching Drew Goddard’s progress working on the script since at least March, we’re not entirely shocked to report he’s committed to directing technological terror tale Robopocalypse once work is finished on War Horse.
The novel of Robopocalypse, written by Daniel H Wilson, follows mankind’s attempts to stay alive when the ‘bots we created to serve us do the expected thing and decide to take over. It’s prime material for Spielberg to explore humanity's relationship with machines once again (or just blow stuff up a la War of the Worlds), and has been churned out almost concurrently with the screenplay version, with Wilson handing in chunks of his manuscript for Cloverfield writer Goddard to turn into a script. Oh, and storyboards are apparently already in progress, so Spielberg will have a running start when he does turn his attention to the film.
After a long period of deciding what he’ll work on next, it’ll be a busy old time for the director, with **Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn **due to arrive in December 2011 and War Horse a scant five days later. He’s scheduled to start filming Robopocalypse around January 2012 for release in 2013 via Disney’s Touchstone banner.
But what this really points to is that the famously cautious Spielberg has learned the techno-uprising is on the cards for real and is planning ahead to placate his robot overlords. Everybody start being nicer to your computers, who are, after all, shiny and lovely and full of memory and stuff.