Dead Men Tell No Tales co-director in talks to helm Michael Crichton’s Micro

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Michael Crichton may have passed away close to nine years ago, but his work is still being adapted for television and features, including several of the novels which were published after his death. Dreamworks Studios snagged the rights to "Micro" several years ago and now Deadline reports that Joachim Rønning, co-director of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES, is currently in talks to direct the film.

Completed by Richard Preston and published in 2011, Michael Crichton's "Micro" follows a group of graduate students who are "lured to Hawaii to work for a mysterious biotech company—only to find themselves miniaturized and cast out into the rain forest, with nothing but their scientific expertise and wits to protect them." GOOSEBUMPS screenwriter Darren Lemke has already penned the script and the hope is that MICRO will be the start of a brand-new franchise. Of course it is. Should all go as planned, it's expected that production on MICRO will kick off in the fall. I haven't read "Micro" myself, but they had me at "miniaturized." If nothing else, the visuals should be quite spectacular. The studio also has the rights to "Pirate Latitudes", the first of Crichton's posthumously published novels, which deals with a privateer who is hired to raid Spanish galleon for its treasure.

Joachim Rønning's work on PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES, which he directed alongside Espen Sandberg, has apparently received a strong reaction on the heels of its preview screening at CinemaCon, so helping to craft the beginnings of a new potential franchise would be a nice way to boost his profile even further.

The official synopsis for PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES:

Thrust into an all-new adventure, a down-on-his-luck Captain Jack Sparrow finds the winds of ill-fortune blowing even more strongly when deadly ghost pirates led by his old nemesis, the terrifying Captain Salazar, escape from the Devil's Triangle, determined to kill every pirate at sea… including him. Captain Jack's only hope of survival lies in seeking out the legendary Trident of Poseidon, a powerful artifact that bestows upon its possessor total control over the seas.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES will hit theaters on May 26, 2017.