Westworld is a very successful HBO show based on an original idea by iconic author Michael Crichton. Now, the team behind that show is hoping to do it again, way down on the ocean floor.
Deadline reports that Sphere, the 1987 Crichton novel — the basis for the 1998 film — is being developed as an HBO series. Denise Thé, a Westworld executive producer and writer, is leading the project, with her Westworld collaborators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy on board, as well as Robert Downey Jr. and Susan Downey, who currently produce HBO’s Perry Mason.
Sphere is about a group of scientists who find a highly advanced (you guessed it) sphere on the ocean floor. They don’t know where it came from. They don’t know what it does. But as they figure those things out, everything gets very freaking weird. After all, this is a story from the mind behind not just Westworld, but Jurassic Park, Congo, and dozens of others. Time travel is involved. Space. You name it.
There’s no word on, well, anything else beyond that. Sphere is in the works from HBO. That’s it. But it’s certainly a novel that could benefit from a longer, more in-depth adaptation. To say the film, which starred Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson, wasn’t quite up to par would be kind — though it has developed a cult following over the last 20 years.
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