Joe Dante’s Explorers is getting its second wind on TV. According to Deadline, Cary Fukunaga and David Lowery are joining forces to produce a new version of the cult sci-fi film. Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix made their feature film debuts in Explorers. It told the story of three friends who travel to space in a homemade rocket ship. There, they meet a handful of aliens who essentially look like rejects from the Max Rebo Band.
The report says that Fukunaga and Lowery will co-write the pilot script for Paramount Television and one of them will direct the episode. Fukunaga’s latest effort is the Netflix series Maniac, starring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone. He was also recently chosen to replace Danny Boyle as the director of the next James Bond installment. Lowery, meanwhile, has directed the live-action Pete’s Dragon remake, A Ghost Story, and this year’s The Old Man & the Gun.
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If the series is picked up, it would probably depend on the nostalgia-indebted success experienced by the likes of Super 8 and Stranger Things. Explorers was a critical and financial flop when it hit theaters more than three decades ago. Dante himself expressed his disappointment with the film in an interview with TIFF earlier this year. He claimed that Paramount “didn’t let [him] finish the movie. They basically released a rough cut. So it was a disaster financially and critically, and doesn’t really represent the movie that I was trying to make. [The studio] just wanted to put it out and get it over with.”
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