Phillip K. Dick’s Adjustment Team is coming to the movies - at least providing some brave studio is willing to take a punt on a Matt Damon sci-fi romance movie. So, no question then. This will get snapped up, recession or no recession.

According to Variety, the proposed movie version has been retitled Adjustment Bureau, for all the Kafkaesque implications that provides, and comes as a package: Damon to star, George Nolfi to direct from his own screenplay. Nolfi previously scripted Ocean’s Twelve (which is my favorite of the three) and The Bourne Ultimatum (again, my favorite of the three) and is now inking the screenplay for Bourne 4.

The premise of the original Adjustment Team story is a good one, though certain elements will be familiar to anybody who has seen Dark City: a real-estate salesman discovers that his reality is a big ol’ fake, controlled by mysterious overlords who change it up as part of some enigmatic process. If I remember correctly, this salesman has a wife who has to have her experience changed out of sync with her husbands - but I might be wrong, I read it almost 20 years ago now. I might just be remembering Dark City. I have that with Bladerunner and Electric Sheep too, in some respects, and I’ve even mistaken Minority Report for a Phillip K. Dick adaptation before - but it’s okay, I’ve come to my senses now and won’t be fooled again. It’s so clearly nothing of the sort, no matter what they titled it.

We had a wild run on Phillip K. Dick options a few years back but, thankfully, that dried up before they ran the author’s name into the ground once and for all. Then, more recently, duelling Dick biopics were expected. One of them, Tony Grisoni’s The Owl in Daylight, never entered production and Your Name Here, which stars Bill Pullman as “William J. Frick” in a quasi-Valis mish-mash of alternative realities, hasn’t yet made it into wide distribution.