There's another change coming for the adaptation of Patrick Ness' novel Chaos Walking. The latest news is that Doug Liman is in talks to take over directing the film, replacing Robert Zemeckis.
Ness’ trilogy – The Knife Of Never Letting Go, The Ask And The Answer and Monsters Of Men – finds humankind in a dystopian future, colonising a distant planet after the Earth has been ruined. When an infection called the Noise strikes, all thoughts become audible and chaos follows.
A corrupt autocrat takes the chance to seize control of the human settlements in order to launch a strike on native alien race the Spackles, blaming them for the infection that's apparently killing human women. Young Todd Hewitt, the only boy in a town solely comprised of men, rebels to stop the oncoming destruction. Going on the run with his dog, he teams up with a mysterious, girl who is the source of a precious patch of silence.
This one has been through some shifts since Lionsgate snapped up the rights to the trilogy in 2011 in hopes of finding something to stand alongside the success of its other YA-based franchises, the Twilight and Hunger Games series. But despite the involvement of Charlie Kaufman and more recently Money Monster's Jamie Linden on the scripting side, it has lingered in development. Now producer Doug Davison is looking to bring his Mena director aboard, with the hope that it can finally get moving later in the year.
Mena, which reunites Liman with Edge Of Tomorrow's Tom Cruise, will arrive in the UK on January 3 next year.