Ash Vs. Evil Dead creator and former Spider-Man director Sam Raimi has signed on to direct World War 3 (not to be confused with its better-known apocalyptic counterpart, World War Z). Warner Bros. has apparently just closed a deal for Raimi to helm a film adaptation of The Next 100 Years, geopolitical forecaster George Friedman’s 2009 book of speculative non-fiction, which predicts (along with a bunch of other things) a third world war between the U.S. and a Turkish-Japanese alliance, kicking off some time around 2050.
And while that doesn’t necessarily sound like subject matter ripe for Raimi’s Looney Tunes-inspired sensibilities—unless he can figure out a way to depict the political fragmentation of Russia via some zippy P.O.V. shots—the details of the proposed war do sound like they’d make for a pretty cool movie. Friedman’s vision of the future, after all, includes both “infantrymen with highly sophisticated, powered body-armor,” and battles waged for control of military bases on the moon, both of which sound pretty fun. (Hand-wringing pacifists can console themselves with the fact that Friedman’s awesome moon war only kills about 50,000 people, which is incredibly good as far as World War track records go.)
Raimi’s been occupying himself lately with the first season of Ash Vs. Evil Dead; his last feature film was 2013’s Oz The Great And Powerful, which many critics chastised for tonal inconsistencies, as well as a telling lack of dudes in robot suits fighting each other on the moon.