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Shyamalan to make Signs for Disney

Arthur J Pais

Manoj Night Shyamalan, whose last film, Unbreakable, grossed a strong $250 million worldwide, has been signed on to direct Signs for Walt Disney Pictures. This will be his fourth film for the studio.

Daily Variety, which reported the deal, noted that while Disney or Shyamalan would not comment on the specifics, it would have fetched him not less than the $10 million he received for the script and direction of Unbreakable. He got $5 million for his script, $2 million more than what he had received for The Sixth Sense.

Though Unbreakable did considerably less business than The Sixth Sense, which grossed about $680 million worldwide, it still emerged as one of the more profitable films of the year 2000.

Shyamalan is known to make films for far less than the Hollywood average of $80 million. Unbreakable was made for about $50 million, with Shyamalan and Willis getting a cut of the box office.

Variety reported that the new movie too would be a supernatural thriller. No details about the star cast have been announced. Will Bruce Willis, who led the cast of Shyamalan's last two movies, have a role in the new film? Too early for details, the grapevine says.

Shyamalan's first film for Disney -- specifically for Miramax, an arm of Disney -- was a box-office disaster and artistic thud. Wide Awake, a story of a young boy trying to connect to his dead grandfather, was made for less than $3 million three years ago. It did not even earn $1 million.

But by then Shyamalan had already sold the script for the supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense. The movie not only remained at the top of the box office for many weeks, but also garnered many Oscar nominations, including in the best picture and best director categories.

Except for his first film Praying with Anger, which was shot mostly in Madras where Shyamalan was born, his next three movie were lensed in and around his home town near Philadelphia.

Variety reports the new thriller -- which will also be shot in Philadelphia and elsewhere in Pennsylvania -- revolves around the sudden appearance of a gigantic array of circles and lines found carved into the crops of a farming family.

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