The news we all expected arrived today, Neill Blomkamp will not be following up his trip to District 9 with a sojourn at the Shire for the directorless Hobbit films, and within these reports came a few hints about where Blomkamp will be heading with his next film.
It’s not the rumoured District 8, but Blomkamp remains in the sci-fi genre for the film entitled Elysium. It’s a script from an original idea the director had after finishing District 9, and while there’s not a huge amount of information or details, in interviews Blomkamp has given, this one in the L.A. Times is a good example, he talks of his desire to encapsulate social issues within a sci-fi context – exactly as he did with District 9.
In some ways it’s good to see Blomkamp looking to remove himself from under the wing of Peter Jackson, as a Hobbit bound adventure ran the risk of aligning the two forever, also the budgets of the Hobbit films may have nailed down Blomkamp’s creative feet not to mention the shadow of Guillermo del Toro which the resulting Hobbit director will have to extricate themselves from.
