We have been more than vocal about our feeling that Sam Worthington is being pushed onto worldwide audiences as an action star, regardless of his relative merits. His work in films like Avatar, Terminator Salvation, and most recently Clash of the Titans, however, proves to studios that he’s a bankable enough name to attach him to even more potential franchises.
With that in mind, Worthington has just been tapped to play the titular role in Dreamworks’ upcoming big-budget sci-fi adaptation of the literary character Allan Quatermain, in the film Quatermain. From Heat Vision:
Allan Quatermain was the hero of “King’s Solomon’s Mines,” a Victorian adventure novel by H. Rider Haggard, and its sequel, “Allan Quatermain.” In the first book, Quatermain leads an expedition into an unexplored region of Africa to find the brother of a friend as well as a fabled treasure of the lost mines.
DreamWorks’ version is set in a time in which humans have left Earth and sees Quatermain return to the planet from a sojourn in space, embarking on another “King Solomon’s Mines”-style adventure but on a planetwide scale. Mark Verheiden was the writer behind the first script when the project was revealed early last year.
The adaptation is very easily set up to be a franchise, whereas Clash didn’t have much room for a sequel. Worthington will also be stepping up his duties behind the camera as he ads “Producer” to his resume for this film, joining Smallville producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar.
The film has no finished script, even though The Flickcast friend Mark Verheiden wrote the initial drafts, or director just yet, but you can bet Dreamworks will try to squeeze the release date into an already heavy 2012. You can probably expect to see it in 3D as well.
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