George Clooney set to star in Brad Birds 1952

George Clooney is in talks to star in Brad Bird’s long-gestating science-fiction flick, 1952 .

Variety broke the news, stating that Disney see the project as a ‘high-profile tentpole’ while cautioning that the film has not yet been greenlit.

Tantalisingly compared to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind , with the plot revolving around a man’s contact with alien life, this sounds like serious, intelligent sci-fi.

We’d follow any project Bird was behind, and with Clooney in talks, we can be certain this’ll be anything but a generic summer actioner.

The extra-terrestrial flick has been on the back-burner for some time now, and was even considered to be a cover for Star Wars: Episode VII by some particularly fanciful conspiracy theorists.

Damon Lindelof and Jeff Jensen wrote the 1952 script. Seeing as the project is yet to be given the go-ahead, there’s currently no accurate estimate on a release date.

Clooney will next be seen in The Monuments Men , a starry affair that he’s also directing. He has wrangled Daniel Craig, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Cate Blanchett and Jean Dujardin to appear in that one.

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