Cary Fukunaga & David Lowery team up to develop TV pilot based on Explorers

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

I had actually completely forgotten about Joe Dante's EXPLORERS until just this moment, but it all came flooding back immediately. The 1985 coming-of-age sci-fi film starred Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix, and Jason Presson as three young teenagers who came together to build a spaceship after one of them had recurring dreams about a blueprint of some kind. The film eventually gathered a cult following but was considered a box-office flop as Paramount Pictures forced Dante to finish the film before he was ready.

EXPLORERS could be making a return as Deadline has reported that Cary Fukunaga (True Detective) and David Lowery (THE OLD MAN & THE GUN) will be teaming up to develop a TV series based upon EXPLORERS. It's still in the early stages, but the pair will write the pilot script as well as the bible for the potential series. Should Paramount Television order the pilot, it's likely that either Fukunaga or Lowery will direct it. This isn't the first time that Paramount has attempted to bring EXPLORERS back, as they tasked Geoff Moore and Dave Posamentier (BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY) with penning a big-screen remake back in 2014. That project clearly didn't take off, but I have a feeling that EXPLORERS will be in much better hands with Fukunaga and Lowery.

I mentioned earlier that Paramount forced Joe Dante to complete the film before he was ready, and the director has said that close to an hour and a half of footage was left on the cutting room floor when the studio bumped up the release by several months. "They said 'just stop editing the picture, we're gonna put it out, and we got a perfect date for it and we know it'll make a lot of money,'" Dante said. "There was a lot of spiritual kind of stuff in the movie that didn't make it in at all. There's a theory that was around at the time about the world mind and it was a concept I thought was interesting. We started to get into it and there was no way to make any sense out of it, so we just dumped all that." Paramount wound up releasing EXPLORERS on the same weekend as when the Live Aid concert was being broadcast, and the film wound up grossing less than $10 million. Oops.