Phil Lord & Christopher Miller to direct The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

If the past year of living through a pandemic has taught us anything, it's that Hollywood seems to think that we want to keep reliving the damn thing! Deadline has reported that Universal Pictures have snagged the rights to Michael Lewis' new book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story and have tapped Phil Lord and Christopher Miller to direct.

Much like his book The Big Short (which was itself adapted to the big-screen by Adam McKay in 2015), The Premonition focuses on several "medical visionaries who saw the dangers of an exponential Covid spread, based on the information that was coming from China, and by doing mathematical calculations, even as President Trump assured Americans they had nothing to worry about. The focus is in three main characters, a biochemist, a public health worker and a federal government employee who work in the White House. In their own way, they tried to sound the alarm and work around bureaucracies like the CDC. Their efforts didn’t prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths, but it helped keep death counts lower than they otherwise could have been." Deadline states that the tone of The Premonition will be similar to All The President's Men, but with Lord and Miller's involvement, you can't help but think that a little of their trademark humour will be infused into the project as well.

Phil Lord and Christoper Miller will also produce the film alongside Amy Pascal, Aditya Sood, and Rachel O'Connor. The next task will be to land a screenwriter for the project, and it's thought that Lord and Miller will kick off production once they complete their adaptation of Project Hail Mary starring Ryan Gosling. Based on the novel by Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary will find Gosling starring as "an astronaut who wakes up to find himself millions of miles away from home, in a tiny craft with two dead crewmates for company and no recollection of his mission or even his name. But this man will soon discover he is humanity’s only hope for survival from an extinction-level threat."