Jennifer Lopez has lined up her next movie, just a week after signing an overall deal with Netflix: Atlas, a science fiction thriller in which an artificial intelligence has determined that the best way to eliminate war is to eliminate humanity.
According to Deadline, Lopez will produce the film, which will be helmed by San Andreas / Rampage director Brad Peyton.
The film was originally penned by Leo Sardarian (StartUp) and is currently being re-written by Aron Eli Coleite (Heroes, Star Trek: Discovery, Locke & Key). Lopez (Hustlers, pictured above) will play Atlas, a woman who’s working to defend humanity from a malevolent AI soldier. In order to out-maneuver it, she has to partner with another artificial intelligence, something she’s not keen to do.
That sounds pretty generic, but a little digging reveals more information: the film was originally titled The Expansion Project as early as 2017, and it landed on The Black List—an annual roundup of screenplays that have yet to be produced. That listing indicates more of what to expect: The film follows a marine who has been chasing someone, and ends up stranded on a hostile planet with an exo-suit that’s running out of power. A later update in 2020 saw that the project had moved from Warner Bros. to Netflix, with Brad Peyton attached to direct.
There’s no word on when the project will begin production or when it will debut on the platform. It joins a growing catalog of high-profile science fiction films from the company, such as Outside the Wire, The Midnight Sun, The Old Guard, Project Power, and Army of the Dead.
That effort comes while competition heats up as new streaming services from established studios (with deep catalogs) come online, like Disney+ and HBO Max. Netflix has been pouring money and resources into its original content offerings in recent years, and has earned acclaim for some of them.
Hopefully, Atlas will be up to that high caliber: movies about AIs bent on exterminating humanity are a well-worn staple in Hollywood, and it could run the risk of turning out to be a lesser version of Terminator.
