Ben Stiller Reportedly Rebooting Beloved Sci-Fi TV Show as a Movie With Leonardo DiCaprio

Ben Stiller is about to enter another dimension. The Severance director and executive producer is reportedly being eyed to direct The Twilight Zone movie reboot for Warner Bros., according to TheInsneider. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions — the Oscar winner’s production company behind such films as The Wolf of Wall Street, The Revenant, and Killers of the Flower Moon — is developing the project for Warner Bros., which released 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie adapted from the Rod Serling-created and hosted anthology series that aired 156 episodes between 1959 and 1964.

Stiller, who has directed comedies like The Cable Guy, Zoolander, and Tropic Thunder, as well as a dozen episodes of the Apple TV+ drama/sci-fi thriller Severance, hasn’t helmed a feature since his panned 2016 sequel Zoolander 2.

DiCaprio has been attached to The Twilight Zone as a producer since 2008, when Appian began developing a feature version of episodes penned by Serling. (Serling scripted most episodes of The Twilight Zone, which also featured teleplays written by Charles Beaumont, E. Jack Neuman, and sci-fi authors Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and George Clayton Johnson.)

RELATED: 10 Best Episodes of The Twilight Zone Not Written by Rod Serling

In 2008, it was reported that Warner Bros. was negotiating with Serling’s estate for the rights to Serling-penned Twilight Zone episodes to adapt into “one continuing story line based on one or more episodes” unlike the episodic movie. Twilight Zone: The Movie — an anthology consisting of segments directed by John Landis, Steven Spielberg, George Miller, and Joe Dante — adapted episodes like “Back There,” “A Quality of Mercy,” “Kick the Can,” “It’s a Good Life,” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” and featured Albert Brooks, Dan Aykroyd, John Lithgow, and Vic Morrow.

By 2011, Cloverfield filmmaker and future Batman director Matt Reeves was attached to a version of The Twilight Zone scripted by Jason Rothenberg (The 100). According to leaked plot details, Rothenberg’s scripted followed “a test pilot who winds up breaking the speed of light; when he puts down his craft, he discovers that he’s landed a bit late for supper — 96 years late,” suggesting that version was to be an adaptation of 1961’s “The Odyssey of Flight 33,” about a time-traveling commercial airliner.

Reeves eventually exited Twilight Zone for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Warner Bros. tapped Tron: Legacy and Oblivion director Joseph Kosinski to helm the film. The project never made it to the fifth dimension, and CBS Television Studios rebooted The Twilight Zone with a Jordan Peele-produced CBS All Access series that aired 20 episodes over two seasons between 2019 and 2020 before being cancelled.