Bryce Dallas Howard is set to reboot the cult science fiction movie classic Flight of the Navigator. According to Variety, the film marks Howard’s feature directorial debut and reimagines the 1986 kids movie of the same name with a female lead. The Navigator reboot is expected to premiere exclusively on the streaming service Disney Plus.
While Howard’s best known for her acting in action movies like Jurassic World, she’s made something of a name for herself in recent years for her directing work. She helmed two episodes of the sci-fi series The Mandalorian and worked on the upcoming Book of Boba Fett. Clearly, her work’s impressed some important people at Disney who felt confident enough in her abilities to give her the Navigator reboot.
Directed by Randal Kleiser, the original Flight of the Navigator was a sci-fi adventure movie starring followed Joey Cramer as David Freeman. David’s an ordinary kid until he’s abducted by an alien spaceship while out in the woods one day. Some temporal confusion leads to David being transporting from 1978 to 1986. Lost in time, David must battle NASA agents to get back to the ship that can take him home to his family.
Howard’s not the first filmmaker to try and remake Navigator. In 2009 it was reported that Disney had hired Arrested Development producer Brad Copeland to write a script for a potential reboot. That project never took off, and eventually, Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow and his frequent collaborator Derek Connolly came on board to rewrite the script.
The last time we got an update about the reboot was in 2017 when Disney announced Joe Henderson was working on a new script. It is unknown at this moment which script Howard will be working from.