Is The 'Flight Of The Navigator' Remake Dead? 'Jurassic World' Filmmaker Colin Trevorrow Gives Us An Update

In November 2012, it was revealed that director Colin Trevorrow had been hired by Disney to work on a new version of the 1986 film Flight of the Navigator, in which a young boy disappears, only to return home eight years later, without appearing to have aged at all.

It has been a few years since the announcement, and Trevorrow's new film Jurassic World hits theaters this weekend. During my interview with the filmmaker I asked for a status update on the Flight of the Navigator remake, to which he has been attached alongside his Safety Not Guaranteed and Jurassic World co-writer Derek Connolly. But it sounds like the project is no longer in the works, at least not with Trevorrow involved. Find out what happened and learn about his take on the remake, after the jump.

The following is an excerpt from my interview with Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow, which will be published in full later this week:

I'm a huge fan of Flight of the Navigator, so I have to ask you what's going on with that film? Colin Trevorrow: You know, I haven't thought about it for quite. Derek [Connolly] and I did a draft of that and it was just one of those things that I don't know if they're still developing it. I know they were thinking of doing it for a while and I wonder if the priorities of Disney have just changed or evolved. That was pre-Marvel expanding universe, pre-Star Wars. A lot of things have changed over there. So I don't know what's going on with that one. I know that I probably only if at all I only have one more movie from my childhood card to play. So I may hold it.Can you share your unique take on Flight of The Navigator, since it sounds like it's not happening?

It was about brothers. I remember what the themes of it were, maybe we didn't change it enough. That movie didn't make a lot of money. It's something that we loved 'cause we saw it at a certain time, but I found a lot of the elements in that movie to be pretty great. And we made it that we got off the planet a little bit and we made it different in scope. And in the end, it was about those brothers. But I honestly it was so much has happened since then that I'd have to go back and look at what we did.

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So it sounds like it might not be a priority at the Mouse House any longer, and if the Flight of the Navigator remake is still in development, it certainly sounds like Trevorrow is no longer involved in the remake. Flight of the Navigator captured my imagination as a child, too, and the reality of returning home years later to find everyone has moved on and changed somehow scared the hell out of me. I'm not sure it needs to be remade, but its definitely a movie which has room for improvement.

Again, my full interview with Colin will be released later in the week.

For those of you who never saw the original Flight of the Navigator, it told the story of a 12-year-old boy named David who is abducted by an alien spacecraft in 1978, and returned to earth a few hours later. But due to the time dilation, it is eight years later on Earth. Here is a trailer:

Flight of the Navigator was a small hit when it was released in the summer of 1986, but later became a cult classic on television and home video. The film is also notable for being the world's first 35mm feature film to use environment mapping, and also for composer Alan Silvestri's entirely electronically-generated score. The film also featured Sarah Jessica Parker, and Paul Reubens as the voice of Max, the robotic pilot of the alien ship.