The coming robot apocalypse of Steven Spielberg’s Robopocalypse will get a comic companion film, it seems, as Jack Black is now attached to produce an adaptation of Robopocalypse author Daniel H. Wilson’s other book about robot apocalypses, How To Survive A Robot Uprising. Rights to the book were actually picked up long before Robopocalypse (which, as previously reported, isn’t even out yet), with Mike Myers optioning and The State and Reno 911 alums Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant stepping in to write the script. That project never came together, leaving Black and Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink free to reacquire the rights, as well as start fresh with a script that i09’s “source” contends “could be the Dr. Strangelove of robot uprising movies”—which is true only in that sense that its major competition for that is, what, Short Circuit? Actually, no, Robocop would probably be the Dr. Strangelove of robot movies. You’re not going to be better than Robocop, so you should probably stop saying that, “source.”
Like Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide, Wilson’s book is a humorous how-to manual offering “serious advice from real robotics experts” on surviving “the inevitable future in which robots rebel against their human masters”—and given that it appeared two years after Brooks’ book became a hit, and the growing competition between zombies and robots as the apocalyptic fads bidding to replace vampires, the similarities are likely not a coincidence. That rivalry should only intensify as Robopocalypse and this thing race that long-gestating adaptation of Max Brooks’ World War Z to production, and try to outrun the also-inevitable future in which audiences tire of seeing movies about the apocalypse.