Anne Hathaway Joins the Cast of Steven Spielberg’s Robopocalypse; Can She Play the Lead, Please?

Anne Hathaway just keeps getting nerdier. First she plays Catwoman. Then Fantine in Les Misérables. (Musicals are no less nerdy for not involving superheroes or sci-fi.) And now she’s joined the cast of Steven Spielberg‘s Robopocalypse, based on a book about robots that gain sentience and start a war against humanity (naturally).

Spielberg bought the rights to Daniel H. Wilson’s  book way back in 2010 before Wilson was even done writing it. The movie was originally supposed to come out this year, but Spielberg has been kinda busy lately (War Horse, The Adventures of Tintin, Lincoln). With this casting news it looks like Robopocalypse is finally coming off the back burner.

Hathaway has confirmed that she’ll be in the film but not who her character is (“I’m back in Secretville.”). The book, like World War Z, is structured as a patchwork oral history with a lot of different characters; Empire speculates that she could play “one of only two substantial female characters on the page – a US senator and a grunt,” while also nothing that “it’s thought that Drew Goddard‘s script will deviate significantly from the source material.”

Chris Hemsworth and Ben Whishaw are also reportedly in talks to join the cast, though nothing’s official yet.

I started reading Robopocalypse a few months back but couldn’t really get into it—it gave me the impression of being a campy rip-off of World War Z (which I love). But maybe I should give it another shot. After all, its adaptation is going to be a big-budget sci-fi film directed by Steven Spielberg, written by the guy who wrote Cloverfield and The Cabin in the Woods, and starring Catwoman and also, possibly, Thor and/or Q.

I don’t want to get my hopes up here, but I’d say it’s likely that Goddard’s pulling a World War Z on the script, giving it a single main character where there wasn’t one before. And if he is, it’s possible that Hathaway could be playing that person. There’s no indication whether or not that’s the case, but I for one think it’d be awesome if she were, given how few female-starring big-budget films are out there. I neither love nor hate Hathaway like a lot of people seem to, but I think she could pull it off.

Plus, a quick look at IMDB tells me that Spielberg hasn’t directed a movie with a female lead since 1985’s The Color Purple. Come on, Steve! Make it happen!

(via: Empire)