Paramount to Remake ‘Explorers’ (Exclusive)

The 1980s sci-fi adventure movie Explorers is getting the remake treatment.

Paramount’s low-budget Insurge label is behind the project, which will be produced by Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec, the writers behind Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and the American version of the British TV series Life on Mars.

Paramount also is hiring Geoff Moore and Dave Posamentier to write the script. The duo are the writer-directors behind Better Living Through Chemistry, a drug dramedy starring Sam Rockwell and Olivia Wilde that opens this weekend. (The pair only are writing Explorers, not directing.)

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Explorers told the story of three teenaged boys who come together to create a homemade space ship. The movie marked the feature debuts of Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix — the third kid was played by Jason Presson — and was directed by Joe Dante, who made his name with Gremlins and The Howling.

With a release date moved up during production, the movie had a third act that was written on the fly and flopped at the box office when it hit theaters in summer 1985. However, Explorers had a second life when released on home video, and it now is considered an ’80s classic. The movie is sometimes cited as being an Amblin film, though it wasn’t produced by Steven Spielberg; Dante, however, is a Spielberg contemporary and worked with the iconic filmmaker on Gremlins and Innerspace, films that came before and after Explorers.

Details on what the 21^st century version of Explorers will look like are being kept under wraps, though an insider said one template could be in the tone of Welcome to Yesterday, an upcoming movie produced by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes and directed by Dean Israelite that has been wowing execs at the studio. Yesterday revolves around teens who construct a time machine.

Moore and Posamentier are repped by Verve and Kaplan/Perrone Entertainment and McKuin Frankel.

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