The Walt Disney Company is preparing to reinvent one of their own titles. They’ve hired Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski and producer Sean Bailey to develop a new version on 1979′s The Black Hole. Travis Beacham will handle the script writing duties. Beacham doesn’t have a ton of experience, but he was one of the writers on Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans.

The original Black Hole featured many big names for the time including Maximilian Schell, Robert Forster, Joseph Bottoms, Yvette Mimieux, Anthony Perkins, Ernest Borgnine, and Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens in voice acting roles. It told the story of a space fleet that discovers a lost ship floating near a black hole (think Event Horizon, but with Disney!). On the ship, they find a scientist who has been missing for twenty years commanding a crew of faceless droids that turn out to be the former crew who tried to form a mutiny. They have received a procedure similar to what we know as a lobotomy in order to ensure their faithful service. The crew attempts to bring the missing team home, but the scientist has no plans to leave or let his servants leave as he plans to enter the black hole and explore where none have explored before.

This is clearly pretty dark sounding for Disney, but the original was naturally quite cheesy. However, as you might imagine, this sounds like it could be an entertaining movie using today’s methods and technologies.

The Black Hole was Disney’s first PG-rated movie and it cost $26 Million, which is pretty impressive for 1979. For example: Ridley Scott’s Alien only cost $11 Million to make in the same year. It will surely be interesting to see how big and bold they go thirty or so years later.

[Source: THR]