Joe Cornish's 'Snow Crash' Might Finally Shoot In 2017

Shortly after Attack the Block knocked the socks off of audiences around the world, director Joe Cornish signed on to helm Snow Crash, an adaptation of Neal Stephenson's iconic novel. Four years later, we still haven't seen or heard much about it. But that doesn't mean it's dead. Producer Frank Marshall says Cornish is still chipping away at the project, and that it could even start shooting next year. 

Collider asked Marshall for an update on the Joe Cornish Snow Crash project. Here's what the producer had to say:

It's a very, very cool book; and Joe Cornish is developing it with us and I hope we get started on that next year, I'm excited about that one... It's a complicated story. It takes place in the near future and it has a lot of virtual reality in it, it's a character that goes back-and-forth between what's called the 'metaverse' in Los Angeles, but the sequences are fantastic and it really gives Joe the opportunity to show that great imagination that he has and create some fantastic scenes. If you look it up you'll see it's sort of the bible of the internet universe. Neil wrote this back in the '90s and you'll see it's a very highly regarded book.

2011's Attack the Block marked Cornish as a major rising talent, so it's a little surprising to realize he hasn't actually directed another movie since then. It's not that he's stopped working. He contributed to the screenplays for Ant-Man and The Adventures of Tintin. And his name seems to pop up whenever people start speculating about which director will be the next to nab one big project or another; he's been rumored for Star Trek Beyond, Gambit, and Kong: Skull Island, and attached to Rust and Section 6 among other projects.

More recently, Star Wars: The Force Awakens star John Boyega, who got his first breakthrough in Attack the Block, hinted that he and Cornish could be working on another movie together. Could that turn out to be Snow Crash? Marshall doesn't say exactly how far along the project is, but apparently it's enough that he thinks shooting could begin in the next year and a half. Meanwhile, Boyega's probably pretty busy between Star Wars, Pacific Rim 2, and that untitled Kathryn Bigelow project, but it's not inconceivable he could find time for an old friend.

Snow Crash was first published in 1992 and has been in development on and off again basically ever since. In addition to its achievements as a work of literature, Stephenson's novel is notable for popularizing the term "avatar" and for helping to inspire real-world technologies like Google Earth. Here is the synopsis:

In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza, Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous...you'll recognize it immediately.