A few months ago it was announced that Brad Bird would direct a new film written by Damon Lindelof called 1952. There was no information released at the time as to what this mysterious project would be about. The only other thing revealed at the time was that it would be a multi-platform project.
Thanks to Vulture we now have a better idea of what we can expect from this film. They say that the movie will be set in the present day, and that it centers around aliens making contact with Earth. According to their sources "Bird and Lindelof want to recapture the spirit of 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, right down to centering it around a man in his late forties, à la Richard Dreyfuss’s Roy Neary."
Sounds good to me! Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of my favorite sci-fi movies ever, and like Super 8, I'd love to see a film capture that spirit again. So you might be wondering why the movie is being called 1952, since the movie doesn't take place in 1952. There's a very interesting backstory behind it,
When Lindelof had a meeting to discuss the project with Disney’s head of production, Sean Bailey, the Disney exec arranged for Lindelof to be given access to one of the studios odder curiosities: a banker’s box of files and documents that had been left moldering in Walt Disney’s personal development lab, WED Enterprises, which later became the studio’s vaunted Imagineering department. The box was originally labeled with the title of the studio’s 1965 comedy That Darn Cat!, which had been crossed out and in its place was written '1952.' Inside was a random-at-first-glance collection of documents and primary source materials that, when looked at all together, indicated that someone had been working on a project (movie? theme park ride?) about alien contact.
That's so cool and intriguing! There's no word on how much of this inspired the movie, but the story will not be set in that year. 1952 was also the same year of the infamous “Washington flap,”in which seven UFOs appeared on radar at National Airport. I imagine all of this stuff will be use in the marketing leading up to the release of the movie.
The site goes on to reveal marketing for the movie will begin before the movie even starts shooting. "The idea is to stage a treasure hunt for intrigued moviegoers that will gradually reveal clues about and build intrigue for the film right up until its release, and which may or may not be related to the contents of the box." Again this is very similar to what Abrams did with Super 8.
I love the concept behind this project and I'm really excited to see how it turns out! It sounds like it's going to be a ton of fun! What do you think about it?