When Worlds Collide!

Spielberg likes to go big or go home.

An upcoming project of his is When Worlds Collide, an adaptation of a 1930s novel (and a 1951 film) about a disaster of astronomical proportions. Wow, I totally just wrote the tagline for his movie. It's gonna cost ya, Spielberg.

Sven Bronson, a South African astronomer, discovers that a pair of rogue planets, Bronson Alpha and Bronson Beta, will soon enter the solar system. The larger one, Alpha, will pass close enough to cause catastrophic damage. Eight months later, after swinging around the Sun, Alpha will return to pulverize the Earth and leave. (Wikipedia)

Geez, this sounds like what every nutcase apocolypse-preaching loony has been talking about since the dawn of time. There's actually a theory out there (amongst the paranoid) about a planet that is part of our solar system but its orbit takes so long, and it travels so far out into space before coming back, that we haven't seen it since the big bang. So the theory goes that once it comes back, it's on a collision course with Earth. DUM DUM DUM! That was suspense music...

Scared yet? Didn't think so. Movies that play on fear of the end of times always do well. People are sick like that.

Anyways, this movie is bound to be a huge record breaking blockbuster, and obviously - we love disaster movies... especially when they throw in science that we don't quite understand and almost convince us the end is nigh.