Twilight Zone Episode Countdown Becomes a Movie

In one of its more classic episodes, the Twilight Zone featured an episode called “Death Ship”, written by legendary sci-fi man Richard Matheson (”I am Legend”), that had a group of astronauts in the future (1997!) searching for new planets to colonize; they land on a strange planet only to discover that there is another ship already on the planet, which looks to have crashed — and it looks just like theirs, including the dead astronauts inside! It was a great episode, and someone at Summit thought so, too, because they’ve greenlit a movie based on the episode, and set first-time director Michael Brandt to write and direct it.

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Brandt will make his directorial debut with the futuristic film, which revolves around a group of astronauts who land on a planet only to find a crashed spaceship and corpses that eerily resemble their own. They then must piece together where they are and whether they might in fact already be dead.

Michael Brandt will write the script along with his partner Derek Haas (the two previously worked on the Angelina Jolie movie “Wanted” and the Western “3:10 to Yuma”), and production is scheduled to begin sometime in the Summer with a $30 million dollar budget.

Like a lot of Twilight Zone episodes, “Countdown” will have plenty of room to manuever. The episode was constricted by its half-hour running time (plus commercials), so there are a lot of questions to explore and answer: was the planet really inhabited by telephatic aliens? Did the ship really break through some time barrier? Are they trapped in a time loop?

Here’s a 2-minute video of the episode, starring Jack Klugman, Ross Martin, and Frederick Beir.