Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp had stepped away from Hollywood for the past few years to focus on writing a novel. That has proven to be a shrewd move as the rights to the book, titled Cold Storage, has just been sold to Paramount following a reportedly fierce bidding war.
Collider reports that the novel is about a virus stored in a government facility that gets out and begins to wreak havoc on the world. Paramount beat out multiple studios for the book, which will be published next year. Koepp will produce the movie and, naturally, is expected to write the script himself.
Koepp’s decision to write a novel wasn’t all that surprising considering the path his career had taken in recent years.
After an absurdly good 90s, where alongside the aforementioned Steven Spielberg film he also penned Mission: Impossible, Death Becomes Her, and Carlito’s Way, his more recent credits include things like Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Ron Howard‘s Inferno, and even a directorial credit for the awful Mortdecai.
Obviously these recent outings were not his best work, so he turned to a slightly different medium in the hope of getting his groove back.
While we obviously can’t yet tell if that has indeed happened with Cold Storage, the bidding war that escalated is probably a good sign, and Koepp will have likely found penning an original story much more satisfying than the kind of paycheque projects on sequels and franchises he’d been stuck with in recent years.
Hopefully Cold Storage – both the book and the film – prove to be good and get Koepp back to his screenwriting best.
#Peace.Love.ColdStorage
