PeterChernin

Today brings good news and bad news for fans of science fiction TV. Let's start with the good. Terra Nova, the Steven Spielberg/Peter Chernin produced drama about a family from around the year 2110 who time travels 150 million years to a dino-ruled prehistoric Earth, has found its shown runner in the form of Brannon Braga. Fans should recognize Braga from his decade-plus strong history with sci-fi TV, which includes producing a chunk of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, Enterprise, Threshold, and, most recently, FlashForward. Deadline.com reports that Braga's deal hasn't been officially finalized, but that it seems unlikely it will fall through.

Now for the bad news...Terra Nova is being produced by 20th Century Fox TV. Yes, the network that canceled Virtuality, Dollhouse, Firefly, John Doe, Drive, Futurama, Brimstone, The Lone Gunmen, Wonderfalls, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is once again trying their hand at a high-concept sci-fi series. I wonder if someone in Vegas is already giving odds on how many episodes of Terra Nova make it to air before Fox buries it in the Friday night death slot.

A few weeks ago Devin Faraci at CHUD relayed how a proposed reboot of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, given the cryptic production title of Caesar, had fallen to the wayside at Fox. In short the problem was this: Writer-director Scott Frank (Minority Report, The Lookout) wanted to make a dark and somber Planet of the Apes film that unraveled how genetic experimentation brought forth the simian uprising that made homo sapiens the minority on Earth. Fox, reportedly, didn't like the idea of a thought-provoking look at the downfall of man and so they scrapped the project.

Or so the Internet thought. NY Magazine's Vulture blog is now clarifying that Fox still wants their stinking paws on a new Planet of the Apes film, they just don't want it to be Scott Frank's Caesar. New Fox producer Peter Chernin is overseeing the untitled film's development and has hired Street Kings writer Jamie Moss to write a new draft. No new director has been tapped yet, but should Moss' new script play to the dumbed-down instincts of Fox (remember, this is the same studio that thought shooting Wolverine with amnesia bullets was cool), chances are they'll be giving the project a steadfast greenlight.

As for Scott Frank, Vulture says he'll be writing a new draft of I Am Number Four, the aliens-go-to-high-school flick D.J. Caruso was just tapped to direct in place of Michael Bay.