According to Variety, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company and Paramount have hired Son Of A Gun director Julius Avery to helm a World War II film called Overlord. The movie is about a pair of paratroopers who drop behind enemy lines and find themselves fighting off Nazi soldiers and “supernatural forces” that have been stirred up by “a secret Nazi experiment”—a.k.a. Nazi zombies. Apparently, Paramount is so excited about this project that it’s already meeting with people to play the two paratrooper stars.
Now, that sounds a bit schlocky for a Bad Robot film, but there’s another wrinkle that might make this a bit more interesting: Overlord was written by Captain Phillips screenwriter Billy Ray, and The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith did some “slight polish” as well. That means there’s a bit of a prestigious shine on this thing, which has inspired io9 to theorize that it’s secretly going to be the next film in the Cloverfield anthology (following The God Particle, which is probably coming out this year).
Like io9, we’re not sure how Nazi zombies will fit in with the existing Cloverfield mythology—not that such a thing really exists—but maybe we’ll eventually find out that the monster trashing New York and the aliens terrorizing Mary Elizabeth Winstead had something to do with Nazi experiments.
[Note: io9, like The A.V. Club, is owned by Univision Communications.]