Just weeks away from Gemini Man, actor Will Smith is staying the course for more sci-fi and fantasy with Brilliance for Paramount Pictures. Deadline‘s Mike Fleming Jr. reports the Bad Boys For Life star will be partnering for a fourth time around with Akiva Goldsman to build a vehicle based on the current literary trilogy from author Marcus Sakey.
If 1% of the world’s children were born with powerful gifts, how would society adapt to them? The Brilliance novel trilogy is set in a future where non-neurotypical people — demonized by society as “twists” or “abnorms” — are threatening the status quo of the “normal” population with their unique gifts. They are officially labeled as “Brilliants” and are carefully tracked by the government.
Smith will play the book series hero Nick Cooper, a federal agent who works for the Department of Analysis and Response. His job is to track down and terminate criminal abnorms who use their gifts for ill. The agent is himself an abnorm, with a gift for predictive analysis that allows him to see what will happen before it happens and react preemptively. He is also the father of a Brilliant daughter.
As he infiltrates a radical group of Brilliants who plan to incite a civil war, he uses his own gifts against his Brilliant enemies, like an assassin who perceives time faster than his opponents. When Cooper is ordered to hunt down John Smith — the country’s most elusive and most dangerous abnorm — everything Cooper believes in will be called into question. As one of the abnorms he’s hunting tells him, “You can’t stop the future. All you can do is pick a side.”
Goldsman will pen the script and will produce at Weed Road with Smith and Lassiter producing at Westbrook and Overbrook, and Salerno via The Story Factory. Sakey will co-produce.