Steven Spielberg might be willing to take on a dead president (and get an Oscar nomination for it, for Lincoln), he won't be dealing with robots any time soon.
Although shooting was to begin early this year for a July 2014 release (after getting postponed from a 2013 release), Spielberg's Robopocalypse will be on hold indefinitely, reports TheWrap and Entertainment Weekly. Adapted by Drew Goddard (who wrote Cloverfield, and co-wrote Cabin in the Woods with Joss Whedon), the movie about a post-apocalyptic robo-world - based on Daniel H. Wilson's book of the same name - won't be moving forward for various reasons, including Spielberg's potential boredom with action films and a script that's just not ready.
Anne Hathaway and Chris Hemsworth were set to star in the movie, so with all these big guns attached, it's reasonable to expect this to be a tentpole project. But it's back to the binary for this one.
So now we can't count on the Mayans or the robots to follow through on their extinction plans!
Update: According to a new exchange between Spielberg and EW, the production will simply be delayed for another six to eight months. Says the director:
"We found that the film was costing a lot of money and I found a better way to tell the story more economically but also much more personally. I found the personal way into Robopocalypse, and so I just told everybody to go find other jobs, I'm starting on a new script and we'll have this movie back on its feet soon... I'm working on it as we speak."
-Aaron Sagers