It's been quite a while in gestation, but the long-awaited next chapter in the 2001 series is happening.
3001: The Final Odyssey is set in 3001 (d'uh) and is so complicated a story to summarise that our brains are literally melting out of our ears. It's something to do with the reanimated corpse of the guy that HAL flushed out the airlock in 2001 and the Monolith thing. Yeah.
Anyways, Ridley Scott is producing the TV miniseries and the story is being adapted by Stuart Beattie, he of Collateral fame. No director is lined up yet, nor has any casting taken place - however SyFy are calling the source material an "extraordinary masterpiece."
Initial thoughts? The fact that Ridley Scott is involved isn't doing it for us. Sure, he's done some good TV work (The Good Wife, Pillars Of Earth) and he's done some terrible TV work (Coma, Labyrinth, the remake of The Andromeda Strain). Not only that, Stuart Beattie's last film was I, Frankenstein. Exactly.
Nevertheless, we're hopeful about this as 3001: The Final Odyssey was originally supposed to be a film with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, but was jettisoned because it was too unwieldy a story for film. A TV miniseries might just be the ticket.
No date has been confirmed for its release.