Back in July I had the chance to sit down with director Seth Gordon while he was promoting his new comedy, Horrible Bosses. Taking the opportunity to ask about his upcoming slate, which is filled with a variety of different projects, I asked what he thinks will be his next film. While he didn't have a precise answer, he said that once the script for the WarGames was written it would rise to the top of the pile. Now that's one step closer to happening.
Deadline has learned that Noah Oppenheim has been hired by MGM to script the 21st century take on the 1983 John Badham film. While Oppenheim doesn't have any writing credits for films that have made it all the way through production, he was hired a few months back to rewrite Summit's The Secret Life of Houdini, wrote the script for Jackie (which both Darren Aronofsky and Rachel Weisz have been attached to since April 2010) and the English-language remake of Snabba Cash.
I remain extremely curious as to how the film will translate into the modern age, where hacking into major government computer systems takes the skill of an expert and can't really be done by accident. Gordon said in our interview that the film will maintain that level of paranoia found in the first film, as we are still very much living in an age of fear. Said Gordon, "We are very, very afraid, and we’ve taken all these steps to make our country more secure, more safe in ways that actually don’t make us more safe at all." It certainly won't be an easy project to tackle, so it will be interesting to see the results.
