Production Weekly were good to their tweet and this weekend’s edition is a monster. Their publication, in case you don’t know, is designed to inform craftspeople and crewfolk from the film industry  about projects that will be hiring - and, not to put too fine a point on it, result in people getting work. As a side effect, they also give the world all manner of bits and pieces of breaking film news. My heroes.

One of the most interesting notes is this bumper, super-expansive edition is their listing for The Robinsons - an adaptation of The Swiss Family Robinson designed to star Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith and all three of the Smith kids - Trey, Jaden and Willow.

The PW entry reads tells us that the film will be about “a family shipwrecked in the East Indies en route to Port Jackson, Australia”. It’s unspoken, but I suspect strongly that this will be a modern day version of the story - quite what other periods would feature an African American family taking a trip to Sydney I don’t know.

On the other hand, Production Weekly’s plot description follows the current Wikipedia introduction of the original Swiss novel  to the letter. Perhaps they’ve cut-and-pasted in error and the locations are all off.

Jonathan Mostow was once set to work with Will Smith on Tonight, He Comes which later became Peter Berg’s Hancock. Mostow then went on to work on a version of The Swiss Family Robinson which seemed to go up a side-road a while as he directed The Surrogates. Now he’s done there, and the project seems to have surfaced again, I wonder if this is the same project Mostow was toiling over. Will this bring Mostow and Smith back together? Or is this going to be Mostow free? Will there be two, competing Robinson movies?

Production Weekly don’t have the answers, listing neither a director nor any producers as yet. I’d be interested to see how it shakes out.