Taylor Kitsch to give science fiction another shot with Neill Blomkamp's next film

Seven years after Battleship and John Carter, Taylor Kitsch is ready to join up with a sci-fi movie that hopefully won’t be a huge flop. Unfortunately it’s a Neill Blomkamp sci-fi movie, so this could go either way, but let’s put Chappie and Elysium out of our minds and be optimistic about this. According to Variety, the movie is called Inferno and it’s about a cop investigating a “seemingly ordinary murder” in the desert who “uncovers a deeper conspiracy” and starts to uncover evidence that the killer is actually a “humanoid beast.” Kitsch will play the cop, making him the square-jawed straight-man to something fantastical which—and this is not meant to be a comment on whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing—is basically the same kind of role he filled in Battleship and John Carter. He doesn’t deserve the blame for those movies not working out too well, so maybe this just means he’s taking on the sort of character that he has a lot of experience with and will act as a grounding force in whatever deep conspiracies and humanoid beasts that Blomkamp has in mind for this.

Speaking of Blomkamp, this is could be the mysterious horror film he left Robocop to work on, but that was months ago and it seemed like he was ready to start filming that project soon, so there might be a different Blomkamp thriller in the works that we don’t know anything about.