After its recent success with its reimagined version of Westworld, HBO is getting ready to adapt another of Michael Crichton’s works: Sphere. According to Deadline, Westworld writer and producer Denise Thé to adapt the novel as a series.
The book follows a team of scientists who are dispatched to a deep-sea research facility, where the U.S. Navy discovered a massive spacecraft sitting on the bottom of the ocean.
Deadline reports that Thé will act as showrunner, and is working with Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s Kilter Films, as well as Susan Downey and Robert Downey Jr.’s Team Downey and Warner Bros. Television for the project.
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A Desolation Called Peace
The novel is a particularly trippy thriller from Crichton, who died in 2008. The U.S. Navy discovers a spacecraft on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and dispatches a team to study it. Right off the bat, they discover that the spacecraft is from Earth, but also that it’s been sitting on the ocean floor for more than 350 years, leading them to believe that it traveled back in time. When they get onboard the ship, they discover a massive spherical object, which looks as though it’s alien in origin.
While the team copes with the intense pressure of their work environment, one team member enters the sphere, and soon after, they come into contact with an apparently alien entity—calling itself Jerry—that can manifest their fears in reality.
The book was adapted as a film in 1998 (pictured above), and starred Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson, Sharon Stone, Liev Schreiber, and Peter Coyote, which wasn’t well received by critics or audiences.
Now HBO will have a crack at it, and the premise of the novel—first contact with an advanced intelligence in a hostile environment—feels as though it would make for a gripping series. With Westworld, the network took significant liberties with the original source material, exploring the grim possibilities of the future of artificial intelligence, and it feels like a similar approach would open up a number of possibilities that went unexplored in Sphere‘s original novel.
This really excites me. As a huge Crichton fan Sphere holds a weird little place in my heart. The first time I read it was probably the 5th grade when I was waaay too young to really fully appreciate the psychological drama that unfolds in the novel but the visuals and action always stuck with me. I’ve re-read the book several times since and feel like it gets better each time. Sadly the previous silver screen adaptation did not live up to the source material or the fantastic cast at all. I tried to give the move another shot a few years ago not having seen it since it came out initially and couldn’t even finish it.
I read it when I was 13 I think? Underwater stuff tends to scare me generally, and I found it pretty horrifying – until the conclusion when I literally through the book against the wall for being a rip off of Forbidden Planet.
The Westworld adaptation is about as far from Crichton’s original as possible – he apparently claimed that WW was an attempt to make a mindless action movie, but the HBO show is almost overstuffed with philosophy and weird ideas – and Jurassic Park has more of a family resemblance to the source novel than anything else. It felt like someone read JP once, loved it, never looked at it a second time, and then wrote fan fiction about it. I think a similar tactic would work well for Sphere – take the two or three really striking scenes from the book, the cool setting, the genuinely clever premise, and then go your own way.
I thought the 90s movie version was awful, despite its talented cast. Nice to see it get a second chance to shine on the screen.
This sounds great :)
I vaguely remember seeing the 90s movie and remember almost nothing. It was like a worse take on “The Abyss”. Now, THAT movie I remember.
Adapt the Rama series, cowards!
I just about a month ago watched the movie after a long time and I daresay my tastes have evolved for the better. Or, to put it more bluntly, that movie sucked. So hopefully this improves on that