FOX HAS IT 'HAPPENING' WITH SHYAMALAN (VAR)

By Nancy Vialatte

M. Night Shyamalan's next film, �The Happening,� has landed at 20th Century Fox. Variety reports that a green light has been given to the spec script thriller which Shyamalan wrote and will direct in Philadelphia this August. Shyamalan will produce with Sam Mercer and Barry Mendel, who produced "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable."

The film is slated for a June, 2008 release.

The Fox deal, which was spearheaded by Fox Filmed Entertainment chairman/CEO Tom Rothman, ends an unusually complex and public process for Shyamalan, who, since "The Sixth Sense," had made all his films for Disney. That was until a falling out over "Lady in the Water" which led him to make that picture for Warner Bros.

This will be the helmer�s first R-rated effort and is a paranoid thriller about a family running from a natural crisis that presents a large-scale threat to humanity, says Variety. The budget will be around $57 million, and Shyamalan told Daily Variety he expects to cast a big male star for the lead.

Shyamalan will prep and shoot "The Happening" as he continues to write the script for "Avatar: The Last Airbender" which will follow at Paramount.

When he visited Hollywood to seal his "Avatar" deal, Shyamalan and his new CAA reps met with execs atop almost every studio. Each read an early draft of "The Happening," which at the time was titled "The Green Effect." The buzz around Hollywood was that no studio loved the draft enough to make a deal. Shyamalan said he wasn't at all bothered by that. Though he didn't return to Philadelphia with a deal, he got strong notes and observations from several top studio execs like Rothman that helped him hone his vision.

By the time he was done six weeks later, several studios offered to green light it, Shyamalan said. He landed at Fox partly because of Rothman's enthusiasm, and also, he said, because the studio has demonstrated acumen in marketing similar apocalyptic fare like "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow."

"Because I'd been so lucky in making successful movies in the past, I was in monogamous relationships with a few studios and the isolation meant I'd never really met anybody," Shyamalan told Variety. "Instead of me just being a name, I was a guy in a room. The thing that's different about me is, when I go out with a script, I am looking for a green light, not some deal where they will develop for two years and then maybe make it."

"Tom felt strongly about making this my first R-rated picture," Shyamalan continued. "We talked about trying to get the kind of intensity that is present in 'Silence of the Lambs,' and the kind that Guillermo del Toro got in `Pan's Labyrinth.' The impact of the beautiful things in that movie wouldn't have landed as strongly if the film had not been R rated."