Paramount is readying Gemini Man for 2019.
The studio announced Thursday that it will release Ang Lee’s clone assassin movie on Oct. 4, 2019. It is currently the only film dated for release during that month.
Will Smith is set to star as an aging assassin who tried to get out of the business but finds himself in the ultimate battle: fighting his own clone who is 25 years younger than him and at the peak of his abilities. Jerry Bruckheimer, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Don Granger are producing the pic, with Don Murphy and Chad Oman serving as executive producers.
The long-gestating project was first set up at Disney in 1997 as a pitch by Darren Lemke, with Murphy producing and Tony Scott directing. While always popular with executives inside and outside the studio, Gemini Man was considered unfilmable for many years, as visual effects technology did not yet allow for the same actor to realistically play two different ages.
Jerry Bruckheimer Films and Skydance Media are resuming the project, with Lee — who has pushed the VFX envelope with Life of Pi and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk — directing the high-concept action thriller. The project will finally be realized, as more films have recently used digital effects to “de-age” actors in flashback scenes, including Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy, Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Kurt Russell in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Michael Douglas in Ant-Man and Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America: Civil War, to name a few.
