Will Smith is making moves after the Oscars drama from this year’s event.
The actor and producer is set to work with Ms. Marvel’s Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy on a new sci-fi thriller film based on the novel Brilliance. Deadline reports that the four-time Emmy- and two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy will make her narrative feature directorial debut with the project. The script comes from Akiva Goldsman, who reunites with Will Smith after working on I, Robot, I Am Legend, and Hancock together.
As per Deadline, the plot of Brilliance goes as follows:
‘If 1% of the world’s children were born with powerful gifts, how would society adapt to them? The Brilliance novel trilogy is set in a future where non-neurotypical people — demonized by society as “twists” or “abnorms” — are threatening the status quo of the “normal” population with their unique gifts. They are officially labeled as “Brilliants” and are carefully tracked by the government. The plan is for Smith to play the book series hero Nick Cooper, a federal agent who works for the Department of Analysis and Response. His job is to track down and terminate criminal abnorms who use their gifts for ill. The agent is himself an abnorm, with a gift for predictive analysis that allows him to see what will happen before it happens and react preemptively. He is also the father of a Brilliant daughter.
As he infiltrates a radical group of Brilliants who plan to incite a civil war, he uses his own gifts against his Brilliant enemies, like an assassin who perceives time faster than his opponents. When Cooper is ordered to hunt down John Smith — the country’s most elusive and most dangerous abnorm — everything Cooper believes in will be called into question. As one of the abnorms he’s hunting tells him, “You can’t stop the future. All you can do is pick a side.”’
As you’ll recall, Smith was the central part of “The Slap’ at the Academy Awards, where he stuck presenter Chris Rock before winning the Best Actor Oscar for King Richard later in the evening, and was subsequently banned by the Academy for a decade. He’ll next be seen on screen in the upcoming Emancipation, playing a hunted runaway enslaved man who struggles to freedom in the dangerous swamps of Louisiana. The film is from Antoine Fuqua, and Apple looks to release it this December.
Can a major Paramount sci-fi film like Brilliance help Will Smith to relaunch this new era of his career? Will this be the starting vehicle needed to launch director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy further into the mainstream? Only time will tell, but be sure to follow Flickering Myth for more updates on this story.
