John Krasinski and the producers of A Quiet Place (Michael Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller) are reteaming for Life on Mars.
Paramount, which distributed the horror movie, is expected to get the project. There is no writer on board and Krasinski, at this stage, is not expected to star. He will also be a producer on the project, alongside Allyson Seeger, an executive at his Sunday Night Productions banner.
The project will adapt a short story by Cecil Castellucci titled “We Have Always Lived on Mars,” which centers on a woman who is among a handful of descendants of a Martian colony long-abandoned by Earth following a cataclysm. The woman finds that she can breathe the air on Mars, upending her world and that of her fellow colonists.
Krasinski found the story and brought it to his Platinum Dunes cohorts, sources say.
A Quiet Place dominated the box office, opening to an astounding $50.2 million.
The Paramount movie, made for only $17 million, revolves around a family trying to survive in a world where any sound made attracts murderous aliens. The pic is not only a box-office hit but a critical one as well, sitting with a 96 percent score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
Krasinski came to prominence acting on the NBC comedy The Office, but A Quiet Place has put him on the hot directors list.
Krasinski made his directorial debut with 2009’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, an adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s short stories. The film debuted at Sundance and earned $33,000 in limited release.
In 2016, Krasinski wrote and directed the comedy-drama The Hollars, in which he starred opposite Anna Kendrick. The film about a dysfunctional clan brought together by the life-threatening illness of its beloved matriarch earned only $1 million at the box office.
Krasinski next stars as the title character in the Amazon series Jack Ryan, based on the Tom Clancy character and produced by Paramount TV.