Last June, it looked Eli Roth would be the man to finally hoist giant prehistoric shark thriller Meg from the development depths. But after apparently not finding what he wanted, he's quietly packed up his rod and reel and gone home. Bur fear not, shark fans: National Treasure director Jon Turteltaub is looking to take his own stab for Warner Bros.
For the uninitiated, Meg is the story of two men – deep sea diver Jonas Taylor and pal Masao Tanaka – who have to stop a group of giant megalodons that have survived to the present day from escaping the Mariana Trench and heading to California’s coastline. They aren’t, as you might expect, all that successful in containing all the creatures, and that’s when it becomes really, really unsafe to go back into the water. For the new version of the film, the location has been switched to China rather than California, a little wrinkle that has helped score the country’s Gravity Pictures to share the production cost.
Steve Alten’s source novel, called MEG, hit shelves in 1997 and saw its rights snapped up by Disney that same year, which put it into turnaround when Deep Blue Sea came and went without striking enough of a chord to generate a sharkgasm. In that time, it has gone through various drafts and looked like it might be made more than once. Thanks to Jurassic World's monster success, it reared up again last year with Roth considering the idea. Now, it has a script by Dean Georgaris and a potential director in Turteltaub who, thanks to his work on Last Vegas, knows something about wrangling grumpy, ancient creatures. Heyooo!