Imagine that there is an Area 51 where the government has collected and cataloged evidence of extraterrestrial life; every element prodded and studied by swaths of scientists and engineers. Well, once they've completed their secretive tests, they'd need a place to store these potentially dangerous items.
This is where Brian Haberlin's four-book comic miniseries Area 52 is set, an isolated warehouse in Antarctica that holds all the extraterrestrials odds and ends the government wants kept under wraps. Stationed to play security is a band of misfit soldiers whose humdrum guard duty becomes a battle of life or death when a homicidal alien is hatched and hungry for carnage. To defend themselves, they must make sense of the strange otherworldly artifacts to find weapons that can kill this ferocious beast from beyond the stars.
Sure, it sounds like The Thing, but that's not stopping Summit Entertainment from adapting Area 52 into a sci-fi thriller. The studio acquired rights to the property last year, and now THR reveals Summit has hired up-and-coming screenwriter Johnny Rosenthal to pen the script. Though Rosenthal has no produced feature screenplays to his credit, he was tapped to pen a sequel to Bad Santa 2 last summer. Of course, Area 52 doesn't sound like it will have anything in common with the crude comedy's in-development sequel, but it seems his pitch to Summit must have been solid as the studio is giving him a clean slate to start from despite the fact that a movie version of Area 52 has been in the works, bouncing about Hollywood, for years.
