Pirates of the Caribbean director is making a self-driving car race movie

Driverless cars appear to be slowly but surely moving toward an eventual presence on the road, and Hollywood is taking notice. According to Deadline, Gore Verbinski — who directed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies — is working on an action comedy about a driverless car race. Fittingly enough for the modern tech industry, it sounds like the film is about startups going way over the top: the plot reportedly has startups testing out beta software for self-driving cars on a trip from Paris to Beijing, but the companies eventually get way too competitive and turn it into a race.


Sony Pictures has acquired the film pitch, and Steve Conrad, who wrote The Pursuit of Happyness, is creating the script, according to Deadline. The project is reportedly "on a fast track," and Verbinski makes it sound like they're really moving forward with this. He promises to round up the "the funniest comedic actors of this generation" for the cast.

Verbinski intends for the film to explore how passengers will handle being driven around without much control over their vehicle. Naturally, that'll be done in a comedic way, but it really is a timely subject with plenty of room for exploration. In the film, the vehicles' passengers will eventually commandeer control of the cars, which is certainly a plausible outcome as drivers push back against these new vehicles' constraints. There's no word on how quickly Verbinski plans to turn this movie around, but if it really is on a fast track, it should be in theaters well before self-driving cars are really on the roads.