Eli Roth Will Direct Prehistoric Shark Movie MEG

Hollywood has been trying to make a movie out of Steve Alten's New York Times bestseller Meg for decades, and now Variety reports that the movie is finally going to happen with horror director Eli Roth at the helm. Meg — short for Megalodon — follows two men who attempt to destroy a monster shark that's terrorizing the coast of California, but the setting in the film will be moved to China to allow for better co-financing and distribution overseas. 

Here's the synopsis of the book:

On a top-secret dive into the Pacific Ocean’s deepest canyon, Jonas Taylor found himself face-to-face with the largest and most ferocious predator in the history of the animal kingdom. The sole survivor of the mission, Taylor is haunted by what he’s sure he saw but still can’t prove exists – Carcharodon megalodon, the massive mother of the great white shark. The average prehistoric Meg weighs in at twenty tons and could tear apart a Tyrannosaurus rex in seconds.

Written off as a crackpot suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Taylor refuses to forget the depths that nearly cost him his life. With a Ph.D. in paleontology under his belt, Taylor spends years theorizing, lecturing, and writing about the possibility that Meg still feeds at the deepest levels of the sea. But it takes an old friend in need to get him to return to the water, and a hotshot female submarine pilot to dare him back into a high-tech miniature sub.

Diving deeper than he ever has before, Taylor will face terror like he’s never imagined, and what he finds could turn the tides bloody red until the end of time. MEG is about to surface. When she does, nothing and no one is going to be safe, and Jonas must face his greatest fear once again.

Roth sounds like a great fit for this story, and I'm hoping he's able to really sink his teeth into it (pun absolutely intended) and depict some crazy shark attacks without being wrangled too much by the studio. This will be the biggest movie he's ever worked on, and with Jurassic World doing major money for Universal, it looks like Warner Bros. is trying to cash in on the ancient animal attack genre quickly.

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