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Spielberg's Abandoned Robopocalypse Becomes a TV Show, Rosamund Pike Body Horror, 1408 Sequel — Pop Culture Digest — November 9, 2026
Spielberg's abandoned Robopocalypse is being revived as a Ron Howard TV series, Rosamund Pike is starring in a body-horror film about influencer motherhood, and a folk-horror movie is being made about the disastrous shoot of Witchfinder General. Plus a 1408 sequel passes the torch to Natalia Dyer, and Sony buys the self-published romantasy that racked up 100 million Kindle page reads.
Spielberg's Abandoned Robopocalypse Is Coming Back as a Ron Howard TV Series
Robopocalypse has spent fifteen years being the most famous movie nobody made. Steven Spielberg optioned Daniel H. Wilson's novel before it was even published, hired Drew Goddard to write it, and attached Anne Hathaway and Chris Hemsworth. Then he postponed it indefinitely in 2014. Michael Bay picked it up in 2018. That version died too.
Now it is coming back as television. The Hollywood Reporter reports that Imagine Entertainment and Akiva Goldsman's Weed Road are developing a series, with Ron Howard attached to direct the pilot and Goldsman set to write it and run the show. Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment will executive produce. There is no network or streamer attached yet, which is the sentence that matters: this is a package, not a greenlight.
The book is an oral history of humanity's war against a robot uprising, told in fragments from survivors, soldiers and machines after "Zero Hour," the moment the world's technology turns. That structure is probably why it defeated a two-hour movie. It is a mosaic with no single hero, which is expensive in a film and natural in a series.
It has also aged in a way nobody planned. In 2011, a novel about a coordinated AI-directed machine revolt read as allegory. In 2026, it reads closer to a forecast, and Howard is leaning into that. "Daniel created a future that feels both startling and increasingly plausible," he said, "with characters who must figure out what connects us when the technology we rely on turns against us."
Howard and Goldsman last made A Beautiful Mind together, which won both of them Oscars, and The Da Vinci Code, which made $760 million. That is a strange pair of credentials for a robot apocalypse, but it is exactly the combination a streamer wants: prestige syntax, mass-market instincts, and a title that has been pre-sold by a decade of "whatever happened to that movie?" coverage.
The caution is the same one that killed it twice. Robopocalypse has now been attached to three directors and zero productions. A pilot order would be the first real evidence that the curse has lifted.
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter
Rosamund Pike Is Making a Body-Horror Movie About Influencer Motherhood
The logline for Feed is the best thing you will read this week: "When a desperate mother discovers an obscure collagen supplement that promises to make her tween gymnast daughter an influencer star, the fame and success they crave come fast. But as her daughter goes viral, she begins a monstrous transformation."
Rosamund Pike will star and produce through her Primitive Streak banner. Leslye Headland — the creator of The Acolyte — will direct from a script by Daniella Isaacs. The film is inspired by Hatching, Hanna Bergholm's 2022 Finnish horror movie about a girl who hatches a doppelgänger from an egg, which is a useful signal: this is going to be practical, gooey and mean.
Pike is not pretending the subtext is subtle. "Long have I wanted to make a film that plays anarchically with our obsession with social media and self-improvement, our desire for fame without notable admirable skill and, let's put it out there, the monstrosity of modern motherhood," she said. "'Feed' deals with all these things."
That is a lot of targets for one movie, but the pairing is genuinely interesting. Headland spent the last few years inside the Disney machine and came out the other side with a cancelled Star Wars series and a reputation for formal ambition. Her last feature as director was Sleeping with Other People in 2015. A collagen-horror movie about stage mothers is a hard left turn, and hard left turns are where careers get interesting again.
The package is being sold at the American Film Market next week, with The Veterans handling international rights and CAA Media Finance handling the United States. Shelley Browning, Steven Schneider, Ara Keshishian, Petr Jakl and Sam Ritzenberg are producing. ZQ Entertainment financed development.
Body horror has been having a commercial moment — Clayface, The Substance, Hatching itself — and this one has a hook that fits on a poster: beauty powder that turns your child into something else. The only question is whether the movie is as angry as its premise.
Sources: Variety
Someone Is Finally Making a Movie About the Making of Witchfinder General
Michael Reeves died at 25, three months after Witchfinder General opened in 1968. He had made three features. The last one got Vincent Price the best reviews of his career, and its director spent the shoot openly wishing he could have cast someone else.
That collision is now a film. Variety reports that Nicholas Denton will play Reeves, Tim Downie will play Price, and Hugh Bonneville will play producer and distributor Tony Tenser in Tragedy Man: The Making of Michael Reeves. Michael Ellis, a veteran visual-effects supervisor on the Enola Holmes films, Cloverfield and The Bourne Legacy, will make his feature directing debut. Production is set to begin in late November, with CrossBorder Films selling it at the American Film Market.
The pitch is not a standard biopic. It is a two-hander about a young British director who wanted to burn down the old horror establishment and a Hollywood star who was terrified of becoming obsolete. Reeves saw Price's theatrical style as everything he was trying to leave behind. Price saw a kid with a chip on his shoulder. The financiers saw a name that could open the picture.
The film is based on an unpublished short story by Richard Sheppard, a horror historian, who co-wrote the screenplay with producer Justin Stanley. Sceadwe Films and CrossBorder Films are producing. Set in 1960s London and the East Anglian countryside, it is being positioned as "elevated folk horror," which is the industry's current phrase for a horror movie that would like a BAFTA.
What makes it more than a curiosity is the irony. Witchfinder General was itself a low-budget production full of compromise, and the film about its making is arriving at a moment when the industry is obsessed with the mythology of difficult directors. Reeves only made three films and never got to find out what he would have become. A movie about the week he spent fighting Vincent Price is, in a way, the career he didn't get.
Sources: Variety
The 1408 Sequel Is Passing the Torch, Not Reassembling the Cast
1408 was a bottle movie: one man, one hotel room, one increasingly hostile air conditioner. It cost $25 million and grossed $132 million worldwide in 2007, which is the kind of ratio that makes studio executives stare out of windows.
Now there is a sequel, and it is built like a handoff. Variety reports that Natalia Dyer will star and Elijah Wood will take a supporting role, while original stars John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson are negotiating to return as secondary characters. Mikael Håfström, who directed the first film, is back to direct and co-wrote the script with Mark Verheiden.
That structure is smart. Cusack's Mike Enslin and Jackson's hotel manager Gerald Olin were the whole movie; bringing them back as supporting players lets the sequel use the room as an engine rather than a reunion. The first film worked because it was about a skeptic being dismantled by a place. A new lead means the room gets to do that again to someone who hasn't read the reviews.
Dyer has spent the last decade as Nancy Wheeler on Stranger Things and is currently filming HBO's The Trial of Louise Woodward. Wood has quietly become a horror regular — Ready or Not 2, The Toxic Avenger, Osgood Perkins's The Monkey — and is also returning to Middle-earth for The Hunt for Gollum. Both are good gets for a mid-budget horror sequel that needs a young audience.
Cusack, for his part, has been telling people for years that this was the only sequel he would ever make. "I was lucky that I never had the desire, or no one asked me to do any sequels," he told People in 2025. "There's one that I think would be interesting to do, which would be '1408.' Just because … I think today, you know, most movies suck."
Production is slated for the first quarter of 2027. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Richard Saperstein, Spyglass Media Group and Frank Mayor are producing, with Bluestone Entertainment and FilmNation co-financing. John Papsidera, who cast The Odyssey, is casting. The room is still at the Dolphin Hotel. It has been waiting.
Sources: Variety
Sony Bought the Self-Published Romantasy That Broke Kindle
Liv Zander published Crown Me Dead and Crown Me Yours one week apart in April, with no publisher, no marketing budget and no obvious reason to expect what happened next. Within three and a half months, the two books had racked up more than 100 million Kindle page reads. Crown Me Dead climbed to number five among all eBooks on Amazon.
Sony Pictures has now bought the film rights to the series, The Heartstring Duet. The logline is doing a lot of work: in a kingdom cursed by plague, Elara, the daughter of gravediggers, is offered a bargain to save her dying brother — seduce the reclusive king, make him fall in love with her, and break the curse by dying at his hand. It is dark fantasy, horror and romance in roughly equal measure, which is the exact blend the market currently rewards.
The publishing side moved fast. Hachette's Requited imprint locked up U.S. rights, HarperCollins' HQ took the U.K., and the books have been translated into 14 languages. Print editions were reissued in both countries this week. Zander had already built an audience with the Court of Ravens and Pale Court series, both self-published.
The interesting part is the pipeline, not the deal. Romantasy has spent the last few years as the one corner of publishing where a debut author can outrun the industry's gatekeepers, and Hollywood has noticed. Sony's recent shopping list includes Hollow, Eruption, The Surrogate Mother, Fake Skating, Home Economics and City on Fire — a mix of established authors and BookTok-native properties. Zander is the purest version of the latter: no print deal first, no bestseller list first, just readers finding the book and telling each other.
Sony has bought a series that is still being discovered. The risk is obvious — the second book arrived five months ago, and the audience is still forming. The opportunity is that it already behaves like a franchise: two volumes, a built-in ship, and a premise that fits on a TikTok in four seconds.
Sources: Deadline
Nuggets
- The Bond race just got two more names. Robert Pattinson and Nicholas Hoult both screen-tested for Denis Villeneuve, Variety reports, joining a shortlist that already includes Callum Turner, Josh O'Connor and Jack Lowden. Harry Styles has had discussions about the part, and Theo James has not been ruled out. Variety
- Blumhouse Atomic signed James Tynion IV to a first-look deal. The horror comic creator's Tiny Onion banner will develop Exquisite Corpses — his serial-killer battle-royale comic with Michael Walsh — across film and animation. Something Is Killing the Children is already at Blumhouse with Craig Zobel directing. The Hollywood Reporter
- Netflix's animated Twilight is officially two seasons. Midnight Sun, the animated series retelling the first book from Edward's point of view, has been confirmed for a two-season order. Production was scheduled from August 2026 to May 2027; there is still no release window. Polygon
- Spy x Family is getting a fourth season and a new movie. Toho confirmed both for 2027, with the film set to open in Japan the same year. No word yet on a Western release date. Variety
- A court says The Pitt is similar enough to ER to be sued over. A California appeals court ruled unanimously that the Crichton estate's lawsuit can proceed, finding both shows share a focused commentary on emergency-room medicine. Noah Wyle, John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill were dismissed as individual defendants. Warner Bros. Television says the show is "entirely original." CTV News
Sources: Variety · Deadline · The Hollywood Reporter · Polygon · CTV News
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