First Details Revealed For Mystery Damon Lindelof/Brad Bird Film

The team-up of screenwriter Damon Lindelof and director Brad Bird seems almost too good to be true. Lindelof, co-creator of Lost and co-writer of Prometheus and Bird, writer/director of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, are two filmmakers with major fan cachet, so it was exciting earlier this year when it was revealed Lindelof was writing for Bird to direct, a mystery project possible called 1952. The title represents a year drenched in alien lore.

In the vein of everything these two do though, that was all we knew about the project and now it seems it might not even be true. Vulture has some reported details on the project, saying it's set in present day, and is about aliens contacting Earth, with inspiration taken from Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

UPDATE: Vulture has now changed their tune on this. It's not actually about aliens. Read below.

Lindelof was hired to write the film, with Entertainment Weekly writer Jeff Jensen, back in 2011 and the first update we heard was Bird's involvement earlier this year. Here's the update from Vulture:

It will be set largely in the present day and it is about aliens making contact here on Earth. Our spies tell us that 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.

They also reveal that "the collaborators are planning an elaborate, very J.J. Abrams–like advanced marketing campaign that will start before filming even begins."

UPDATE from Vulture: "While it is true that 1952 is very much in the spirit of Close Encounters (and centers around a Roy Neary-like protagonist), it is not in fact about an alien encounter." The rest of the article continues below.

The biggest surprise here isn't that it'll harken back to Close Encounters or will have a viral marketing campaign, it's that after all the talk about 1952, the film might not be set in 1952. So where did that title come from? The Vulture article has an answer for that as well. Apparently, when Lindelof was hired to write the film he was given access to an old part of Walt Disney's research kept in a box marked "1952," featuring a box full of photos and documents about some sort of Disney themed alien ride/film.

Are you excited about the possibility of a Lindelof/Bird film?