Independence Day director Roland Emmerich is looking to add another notch to his sci-fi movie belt. According to Deadline, Emmerich is in talks to helm Dark Matter for Sony Pictures.

And no, this Dark Matter doesn’t have anything to do with Syfy’s space opera series of the same name, but is instead a big-screen adaptation of Blake Crouch’s New York Times best-selling sci-fi novel released earlier this year (July) to critical acclaim. If Crouch’s name rings a bell, it’s because he’s the author of the Wayward Pines trilogy, which has been adapted for TV by M. Night Shyamalan on Fox.

The movie will be produced by Matt Tolmach (The Amazing Spider-Man, the upcoming Jumanji reboot), who’s apparently been super keen on the book since 2014, when Sony bought the rights for a whopping $1.25 million, based solely on an unfinished 150-page manuscript. Guess they really, really wanted to make a movie out of Crouch's book. So, what’s Dark Matter about? Here’s the logline:

Jason Dessen, a quantum physicist, once had a brilliant research career ahead of him. But after a girlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy and the birth of a son, this future was derailed. Now a professor at a small Chicago college with a warm and loving family life, the physicist is abducted into a world in which his quantum many-worlds theory has become a fully realized technology for inter-dimensional transfer. In the parallel world, he did not marry his girlfriend and they never had a son. He is determined to get back to his other life back, but nefarious powers in the alternate reality conspire to stop him from revealing the criminal lengths they have gone to create the world-hopping technology.

A master of the grand spectacle (Stargate, 1998’s Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, Independence Day: Resurgence, just to name a few), Roland Emmerich could be the perfect man for the job of crafting an engaging sci-fi tale that not only boasts multiple parallel worlds and "inter-dimensional transfer," but is also about the “choices, paths not taken, and how far we’ll go to claim the lives we dream of.” What do you think?

Zoom In

(via Deadline)