'Keeper Of The Lost Cities': Ben Affleck To Direct Film About A Girl With Telepathic Powers

It's been five years since Ben Affleck directed a movie. That film, 2016's Live by Night, was widely considered to be a disappointment, but the producer/actor/director has several projects in the works which could put him right back on top – and he's just added a new movie to that slowly-growing stack.

Affleck is attached to direct Keeper of the Lost Cities, a film adaptation of a best-selling book about a girl with telepathic abilities. While Affleck has suited up as Batman in front of the camera multiple times (and is slated to do so again), this will be the first time he'll be directing a project with a sci-fi or super-powered angle.

Deadline reports that Affleck is attached to direct a live-action Keeper of the Lost Cities movie for Disney, which he will co-write with Kate Gritmon, a rookie writer who previously served as the L.A. assistant to showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss during season 5 of Game of Thrones. This film is based on the bestselling book series by author Shannon Messenger, and is described like this:

In the bestselling novel, a telepathic girl must figure out why she is the key to her brand-new world before the wrong person finds the answer first. When 12-year-old Sophie finally discovers where her secret telepathic ability comes from, she learns she's actually not human but is from another world that exists side-by-side with ours.

Affleck is also set to produce this movie through his Pearl Street production company. But as of now, there's no word on when this will actually start rolling, or even where it will fall on the timeline of projects Affleck is attached to direct. Last we checked, he's still on board to direct Ghost Army (about a secret force that used illusions to trick the Nazis during WWII), King Leopold's Ghost (about rebellion in the Congo), a McMillions movie (about that stranger-than-fiction crime story involving the McDonald's Monopoly game), and perhaps most promisingly, he's attached to direct The Big Goodbye (about the making of Roman Polanski's Chinatown).

So far, Affleck has mostly directed grounded, realistic thrillers, so this seems like a big change of pace for him. Also interesting: this movie is being developed by Disney, so this will be the first project in quite some time that Affleck will be making for a studio that isn't Warner Bros. Could this be the start of a mass exodus of directors bailing from WB after the studio decided to prioritize HBO Max over its relationships with filmmakers?