Last January, we reported that J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot production company were being courted by pretty much everyone in Hollywood with a shitload of money (a.k.a. Warner Bros. and Disney) after reports came out that Paramount had been growing increasingly unhappy with its ongoing development deal with Bad Robot. The company had been paying Abrams a ton of money to make Paramount movies, and in the last few years that mostly consisted of him producing disappointing Star Trek movies and periodically ditching Paramount entirely so he could make Star Wars sequels. Warner Bros. ended up winning, signing Abrams and Bad Robot to a big production deal, and now we’re seeing the first fruits from that partnership
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. has picked up the rights to The Pinkerton, a spec-script written by 10 Cloverfield Lane writer Daniel Casey, with Abrams and Bad Robot now set to make it into a movie. We don’t know much about The Pinkerton, but THR says that it’s a “supernatural revenge thriller” that may feature a “Western setting.” Of course, we see a description like that and automatically assume this will be another secret Cloverfield, so don’t be surprised if a big monster or aliens show up. Also, THR notes that the real-life Pinkerton organization was a detective agency from the 1800s that became famous for “working for corporations during America’s industrial age” (which is the corporate way of saying they were “vicious union-busting punks). Also, the Pinkertons are still around, having objected to their depiction in Red Dead Redemption 2, even though they appreciated that the game showed “clear affection” for the Pinkerton name (it very much did not).
Now, this is The A.V. Club, so you may be thinking that this is the part of the story where we’ll go off on a rant about the shocking number of incomprehensible decisions that went into making J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker and how they don’t bode well for whatever he does next, but we’re not going to do that. The badness of The Rise Of Skywalker was obviously part of a conspiracy on the part of Disney to tank Abrams’ career before he went off to make movies like The Pinkerton for Warner Bros. (which is arguably Disney’s biggest rival). We know for a fact that Micky Mouse personally sat in on writing and editing sessions so he could make bad suggestions like putting Leia in way too much of the movie, and then Abrams had no choice but to follow along because otherwise Bob Iger would break his glasses. That’s all totally true, so we have absolutely no reason to question Abrams’ judgment.