Will Smith is reuniting with writer Akiva Goldsman for the movie Brilliance

Paramount Pictures has signed Will Smith to produce and star in a movie adaptation of Marcus Sakey’s dystopian trilogy, Brilliance.

The story is set in a world where 1% of the children are born with powerful intellectual gifts that threaten the status quo of the “normal” population. These non-neurotypical people, who are referred to as “twists” or “abnorms,” are carefully tracked by the government. Smith will play a government agent named Nick Cooper whose job is to track down and terminate abnorms who use their gifts to commit crimes. Not only is Nick an abnorm himself, but so is his daughter. The first film will find Nick infiltrating a radical group of Brilliants who plan to incite a civil war in the hopes of bringing down its mastermind, a dangerous abnorm imaginatively named John Smith.

A director is not yet on board.

Akiva Goldsman will write the script and produce with James Lassiter and Shane Salerno. Brilliance will be a co-production between Goldsman’s Weed Road, Smith’s Westbrook and Overbrook and Salerno’s the Story Factory.

Fun Fact!

Will Smith was previously attached to star in this same project several years ago when it was at Legendary/Universal. He ultimately pulled out in order to star in Sony’s NFL drama Concussion. It’s actually kind of funny how scripts make their way around town before circling back. We also assume that any issues Smith may have had with the project have since been addressed in the interim.