Apple TV+ snapped up the rights to Blake Crouch’s excellent quantum-tinged parallel universe thriller Dark Matter. Crouch, whose Wayward Pines novels were turned into a sci-fi show of the same name, will adapt his 2016 novel for screen.
The New York Times bestseller Dark Matter follows the story of Jason Dessen, a family man and high-school physics teacher. Walking home one night, Dessen is abducted by a masked stranger and injected with a drug. When he wakes up, he finds that he’s living in a world in which he’s unmarried and has achieved astonishing professional success.
As a big techno-thriller fan, I very much enjoyed Dark Matter. It’s not an entirely original idea, containing elements of Sliding Doors, The Family Man or Groundhog Day squeezed into a science fiction setting. There’s also more than a hint of Looper-style time shenanigans to it. But it makes for a compelling, and entertaining, high-concept thriller.
If anything, I thought the book could have been fleshed out a bit more. While it’s 368 pages long (in the edition I’ve got), the plot races along with very little downtime. Turning it into a series could give the story a bit more time to breathe — particularly when it comes to showing Dessen experiencing his new life.
Dark Matter is being produced by Sony Pictures Television, with Venom producer Matt Tolmach on board. Between this, new seasons of some established Apple TV+ hits, and some A-grade movies from the likes of Martin Scorsese and others, 2021 and beyond is shaping up to be great for Apple’s streaming TV service.
Available to watch soon on Apple TV+
Apple TV+ is available for $4.99 per month, or for free for one year if you buy a new iPad, iPhone, Mac or Apple TV. You can also get a reduced monthly rate through Apple One, the company’s bundle subscription service.
Source: Collider
