Daisy Ridley is heading back to television. She will star in a reimagining of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, now in development at Paramount+ and produced by Legendary Television with the Irwin Allen Estate. Allen made the 1961 feature film and the ABC series of the same name, and the new show draws on both.
A new Lee Crane
Ridley plays Lee Crane, a brilliant ocean scientist. A catastrophic Arctic expedition kills her twin sister, and Lee is pulled into a classified government program. At its center sits the USS Seaview, a retro-futuristic submarine found entombed in ice and marked with symbols from a history that shouldn’t exist. It powers up only when Lee steps aboard.
She ends up in command of a pressure-cooker crew, with an uneasy alliance of government power brokers at her back. Her missions take the Seaview under the waves to contain mysterious forces leaking into our world. Along the way she uncovers a hidden truth about the oceans, an erased chapter of human history and the once-thought mythical city of Atlantis.
Who is making it
Ridley is also an executive producer, working with the show’s writer Akiva Goldsman, whose credits include A Beautiful Mind and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Matt Shakman, of WandaVision and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, will direct. Jon Jashni is another executive producer, and Derek Thielges is co-producer. A writers’ room is already running, sources close to production told Deadline.
Ridley broke through as Rey in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens and returned for The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. Her recent films include the survival thriller We Bury the Dead and Cleaner, a London-set action thriller with Clive Owen. Earlier credits cover The Marsh King’s Daughter, Chaos Walking, Ophelia, Murder on the Orient Express and Peter Rabbit. On television she has appeared in Mr. Selfridge, Toast of London, Younger and Casualty. Next up is Tim West’s fantasy adventure Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, in which she plays the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and the romantic comedy The Last Resort, opposite Alden Ehrenreich.
The 1961 film behind it
Irwin Allen produced and directed the original, a science fiction disaster picture written by Allen and Charles Bennett and released by 20th Century Fox. Walter Pidgeon and Robert Sterling led a cast that also included Peter Lorre, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, Michael Ansara and Frankie Avalon, who sang the title song. It cost about $2 million to make and took in about $7 million. Critics were mixed, but audiences turned out.
In that story, the nuclear submarine Seaview is on diving trials under the Arctic ice, out of radio contact for 96 hours, when the ice starts to crack and melt. The crew surfaces to a burning sky. A meteor shower has set the Van Allen radiation belt on fire, and global temperatures are climbing. Admiral Harriman Nelson and Commodore Lucius Emery calculate that the Earth will die in about three weeks unless the rise is stopped. Their plan is to fire a nuclear missile at the belt from near the Mariana Islands and cut the flames loose from the planet.
The United Nations scientific meeting turns the plan down. Its chief scientist, Emilio Zucco, thinks the belt will burn itself out. Nelson disagrees and heads for the Pacific anyway, with Captain Crane at the helm. Aboard, a saboteur is at work, a giant squid attacks while the crew tries to tap an undersea phone cable to reach the President, and a hostile submarine implodes chasing them into the Mariana Trench. The missile is launched as planned and drives the fire away from Earth.
The film’s sets and models were later pulled out of storage when Allen turned the story into a television series, which ran on ABC from 1964 to 1968 and saved a good deal of money. No premiere date or casting beyond Ridley has been announced for the new version.
Sources
- Daisy Ridley To Lead ‘Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea’ TV Series In Works At Paramount+ From Akiva Goldsman, Matt Shakman & Legendary TV
- Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
- Daisy Ridley To Lead 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' TV Series
Photo: Pierre Goiffon / Unsplash (Unsplash License)
