HBO’s new take on Michael Crichton’s Westworld will tell the story primarily from the robots’ perspective
Way back in 2008, Jurassic Park producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy shot down the idea of a fourth film in the dinosaur franchise in an interview with ComingSoon.net.
“I don’t know,” Kennedy said at the time. “You know, when [Michael] Crichton passed away, I sorta felt maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s a sign that we don’t mess with it.”
Appropriately enough to that franchise, life found a way, and this year’s hugely-successful summer blockbuster, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World, found a bit of Crichton by loosely borrowing the plot (and some of the title) from Westworld, the 1973 sci-fi thriller Crichton wrote and directed. Now being adapted into an HBO series, Westworld saw the Icarian fallout of mankind’s scientific ambition at a successful futuristic theme park. Instead of dinosaurs, though, Westworld had parkgoers facing killer robots. It’s those same robots that are going to help guide the new series into a creative new direction.
“This is very much told from the POV of the robots,” Zap2it reports HBO President of Programming Michael Lombardo as having announced at today’s TCA (Television Critics Association) panel. “The corporate world is as dimensionalized as the park. I think the visitors to the park are really not the primary focus of our show at all… I think in the film, you were very invested in one particular group of humans that were enjoying the park and their experience with the robots. This is not that.”
“Westworld” stars Sir Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright, Miranda Otto, Rodrigo Santoro, Shannon Woodward, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Angela Sarafyan, and Simon Quarterman. Executive producers alongside Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan are J.J. Abrams, Jerry Weintraub and Bryan Burk.
A trailer for the series was also shown during the TCA panel, but it has not yet been released online. Check back, though, as we’ll have it up as soon as it becomes available.
“Westworld” premieres on HBO in 2016.
