A couple weeks ago the web was swirling with news of M. Night Shyamalan’s next film: an adaptation of the Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender. But what we didn’t know is that he has apparently been shopping around another script to a number of studios, and most of them have turned up their noses at it. The movie is supposedly called Green Planet, and it involves some sort of alien presence trying to teach humanity the error of its ways by using nature to strike back at us. According to film ick, the movie is about “the emergence of a New Eden when our flora and fauna come under the influence of something alien and make moves to take back the planet. Think The Day After Tomorrow with more smarts… a strange, upside down way of looking at ecological destruction.”

Yep, that sounds like one of M. Night Shyamalan’s crazy ideas. But you know what? I’m actually pretty interested in it. I can understand why studios might want to pass on something like this, especially given how The Village and Lady in the Water were received by the public. There’s certainly potential for this to be another hokey and pretentious mystical thriller, but I do like how Shyamalan takes present day settings and injects a tiny bit of fantasy into them. No one else has the balls to try stuff like this! At this point it’s a little unclear what the status of this project is. Fox is apparently the only studio that was somewhat interested, but perhaps Shyamalan thought it wise to do something a little different first (ie. Avatar The Last Airbender). Hopefully we do get to see Shyamalan’s Green Planet at some point in the near future.