The long-in-the-making James Cameron-produced version of Fantastic Voyage appears to be back on track, with director Shawn Levy taking over a film that’s been rumored since at least the late ’90s and attached to directors ranging from Roland Emmerich to, most recently, Paul Greengrass. According to Deadline, Levy beat out other contenders like Darren Aronofsky and Louis Letterier at 20th Century Fox, possibly by just pointing to a Night At The Museum poster and doing that little finger thing that means “money.”
And of course, Levy—the director behind other loud and frenetic comedies like Cheaper By The Dozen and Date Night—has been moving further and further toward more straightforward action, having completed Hugh Jackman’s big battlin’ robots movie Real Steel and then immediately signed up to do another unnamed adventure film with Jackman and Lost’s Carlton Cuse. Anyway, Fantastic Voyage, though described as a “re-imagining,” still concerns a team of scientists who are shrunk to microscopic size and then slide, slide, slippity-slide into a colleague’s bloodstream, but for some reason it’s not considered a “remake” of the 1966 original. Maybe because it’s in 3-D, which technically counts as added imagination these days?