Life, as the Jurassic Park genius Ian Malcolm once said, tends to find a way. Perhaps encouraged by the star-studded ensemble at hand, Sony Pictures has opted to ship Daniel Espinosa’s new sci-fi movie to a much more competitive release window – Memorial Day weekend.
Once on course to enter Earth’s orbit on March 24, 2017, Deadline reports that Espinosa’s space thriller will now open opposite long-awaited sequel Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales on May 26. There’s also Universal’s genre comedy – rumored to be titled The Something – to contend with, which orders Zach Galifianakis, Bill Hader and Seth Rogen into the inky blackness of space.
But Sony is clearly confident it’s onto a winner – and with Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson set to star, can you really blame them? Pitched as Alien meets Ten Little Indians, the script for Life hails from Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, following a crew on board the International Space Station that “retrieves the Mars rover with a soil sample that has a fossilized organism. They rebuild it and it comes to life as the first alien species. As it starts to grow, one by one the species starts to kill off the 10 astronaut-crew.”
Though he was initially in line to spearhead that search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, Reynolds recently passed up leading man duties to Jake Gyllenhaal. Elsewhere, Olga Dykhovichnaya and Ariyon Bakare have also closed deals to star.
Vacating a release window that included Power Rangers and Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, it’s out of the frying pan and into the freezer for Daniel Espinosa’s Life, which will now give Dead Men Tell No Tales a run for its box office money on May 26, 2017.