Folks, we’re starting to wonder if Phil Lord and Christopher Miller even like the human race. The Spider-Verse producers—whose other success stories include The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street, Clone High, and all those other things you like—have put together a whole bunch of world-ending scenarios over the years, from Last Man On Earth’s super-virus, to the wastelands of The Lego Movie 2, to a reality in which the sky is cloudy with a chance of meatballs and/or death. Now, THR reports that Lord and Miller—fresh off a Golden Globe win for Spider-Man, and the opening of the latest Lego—have become the subject of a competitive bidding war for their new project, The Last Human.
Based off a kids’ book by Lee Bacon, the film would tell the tale of XR_395, a “12-year-old robot” who ends up stumbling onto a living human being, despite the fact that the species is supposed to be, uh, extinct in the film’s robot-controlled world, which also exists “without crime, pollution, or war.” (Like we said: Bleak.) The pair end up going on a journey together, learning some lessons about rule-breaking and prejudice in the process.
Lord and Miller haven’t directed a movie to completion since 2014's 22 Jump Street; since then, they’ve stuck to writing and producing, plus that whole unfortunate Solo debacle. They’re also supposedly on the hook to direct Artemis, a 2020 adaptation of a book from The Martian’s Andy Weir.