SummitEntertainment

After breaking on the scene with Cabin Fever and the pair of Hostel films, Eli Roth has been mostly absent from the world of horror. That's okay, though, because his excuse for staying away from what made him famous seems to be a new-found fascination with sci-fi (plus he was a little busy practicing his fake Italian accent and baseball bat swing for Inglourious Basterds). He was long attached to write and direct an adaptation of Stephen King's brain-scrambling book Cell, but that fell through after Hostel Part II underperformed at the box office. That freed him up, however, to begin work on a rather secretive project called Endangered Species, which he has let slip was inspired by mass destruction films like Transformers and Cloverfield.

And now it looks like Roth has another sci-fi project in the works that might make a nice double-bill with the elusive Endangered Species. Summit Entertainment, no doubt buoyed by the tremendous performance of the Twilight Saga at the box office, has begun spending money on fresh pitches, one of which Shock Till you Drop tells us is simply titled Invasion. The script was written by relative newcomer Ben Magid, which will be ushered through Summit's development process by Roth and his producing-partner Eric Newman. There are no hints available yet as to whether or not they'll be taking a similar first-person-perspective approach, but the project is being described as Cloverfield-esque; a description I'd say fits quite well the brief setup Shock relayed:

We all know nothing is immune to the clanking, grinding, perpetual remake machine that is Hollywood, but I'm actually a little shocked that it's taken this long for a studio to push along a remake of Russel Mulcahy's 1986 action-fantasy hybrid film Highlander. If much maligned '80s horror films like the House on Sorority Row can muster a remake, surely a franchise as storied as Highlander should be an easy target for a studio re-imagining. Five films, three television series and more comic books and novels than I care to count have been born from Mulcahy's film, and now we can add a new film from Summit Entertainment directed by Justin Lin and produced by Neil H. Moritz to the list.

Lin and Moritz were the same director-producer combo that brought on the money-making fourth installment of Fast & Furious earlier this year, making the duo an easy choice for Summit to entrust their hopeful franchise-restart to. And if hiring broad-appeal filmmakers like Lin and Moritz has you worrying for the state of a new Highlander, you should also know that Summit is bringing in Iron Man screenwriters Art Marcum and Matt Holloway.

Read the rest over at Cinematical