Sharlto Copley exploded onto the scene a couple years ago when Neill Blomkamp put him in the lead role of District 9 and let him ad-lib his way through his brilliant performance. Since then he’s co-starred in The A-Team and is working with Blomkamp on his next deep space project, Elysium.

According to Deadline, Copley recently added another space movie to his upcoming slate in the form of Europa, named for Jupiter’s fourth moon, which will be visited in the film by Copley and a crew of five other astronauts. The astronauts come from various backgrounds and space stations, so obviously this will cause some tension on board the craft, but the extent of their troubles will probably not stop there.

The moon Europa is covered in a smooth surface of relatively new ice under which astronomers believe lies an ocean of water. Following the idea “where there’s water there’s life”, not only do current scientists believe that there is life in the depths of Europa’s frozen ocean, but creating a film based around the moon will give the writers a lot of freedom to create some nasty beasts for our heroes to encounter. Though the exact description of the story is limited to just that it’s about Europa, the whole sci-fi monster stuff is just speculation. But if you were ever going to make a scary movie about space, Europa has the opportunity to make it very real.

Wayfare Entertainment and Misher Films are hard at work getting the script 100% so that they can shop around for a distributor at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival which kicks off today. The team shouldn’t have any trouble finding help getting Europa out to the masses as Copley is a big enough name to create interest, and the story alone is very intriguing, keeping the science very grounded in reality. More on Europa as it moves through the festival.