When you think of the career of Steven Spielberg, odds are what comes to mind are movies like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or one of the other classic films he’s turned out in his career. But generally speaking, you associate him with movies. Well, one of his movies, Minority Report, is coming to the TV screen this fall, and there’s a very specific element that made the director want to make his film into a TV series.
You may have noticed that, unlike the 2002 film, Tom Cruise is not the center of the Minority Report series. The focus shifts instead to the so-called pre-cogs, and it is this change that finally piqued to Spielberg’s interest enough to turn the film into a show. TV Line saw executive producer Darryl Frank at the Television Critics Association press tour, and he said:
The thing that really spoke to [Spielberg] was being able to bring these pre-cogs to life. The chance to humanize the pre-cogs spoke to him more than anything.
When Minority Report hits the airwaves this September, it’s not a reboot or a retelling of the film, or the Philip K. Dick story on which it’s based, instead it’s essentially a sequel, or a continuation. Set in Washington D.C. eleven years after the events of the movie, in the year 2065, the Precrime program has been disbanded, and the three pre-cogs, the mutated humans who could see crimes committed in the future, have scattered. However, one, Dash (Stark Sands), is still haunted by horrific visions of crimes that have yet to happen. He runs away from a remote retreat and teams up with a detective named Lara Vega (Megan Good) to stop murders that haven’t taken place.
Frank’s fellow executive producer, Max Borenstein, who wrote Godzilla and also the Minority Report pilot, talked about the decision to move away from Tom Cruise’s character, a cop who stops future crimes before they go down, and how this freed them to expand the thematic scope of the show. He said:
It felt like just following up on the [Precrime] enforcer would be limiting. [Whereas] the idea of focusing on the pre-cogs, the people who were traumatized by experiencing these murder visions all of their lives, is just fascinating. It allows us to dig into the ethical issues of what responsibility somebody has if they see that future. That was the reason we decided to shift focus.
Even though it’s set in the same world, with a few of the same characters, we already knew that Minority Report the series was going to be drastically different than Minority Report the movie. From what Frank and Borenstein say, it sounds like these differences are what drew many participants to this project.
Minority Report also stars Wilmer Valderrama as Lara Vega’s colleague Will Blake, and Nick Zano and Laura Regan as Arthur and Agatha, the other two pre-cogs of the original trio. The series debuts on Fox on Monday, September 21.
