As Jeff Nichols premieres the civil rights drama Loving here at Toronto this weekend, he’s preparing to take a less obvious look at the subject of racism. Nichols is making a deal at 20th Century Fox to write and direct a remake of Alien Nation, the 1988 science fiction thriller that took the mismatched buddy cop concept to the extreme. The original starred James Caan as a racist cop who is forced to team with a member of an alien race which came to Earth when a ship carrying 300,000 enslaved aliens crashed, with the newcomers assimilating in Los Angeles. That extraterrestrial partner was played by Mandy Patinkin in the Graham Baker-directed original, which spawned a 1989 TV series. Down to its title, the film was a clever metaphor to explore racism, and it seems timeless in relation to current racial politics.

It becomes another thoughtful film for Nichols, who launched in features with Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, Mud, and most recently the sci-fi thriller Midnight Special. Perhaps it is too early to speculate about the potential involvement of Michael Shannon in Alien Nation, but perhaps not considering he and Nichols have become regular collaborators, Shannon would be a strong fit for either the human or the alien cop. I have no idea if it has even been pondered at this stage, but it seems a natural.

So I’ve been working on Alien Nation like for two years, the screenplay. And I’m still … I’m almost done with it. I’m hoping this draft that I’m working on now will be my last. The studio seems to really love it, and we’re working on conception design of the aliens and everything else, and it happens to be a studio that’s being bought by Disney right now. I’m working with Fox on it, so it feels a little bit like you’re one of those monks doing those giant murals in sand. It might just blow away, which would be a real shame, but everybody at Fox has been so good to me about it. And they’re so positive about it, obviously I’m trying to stay in the positive zone, and hopefully knock out this last draft.

It’s epic. I mean, it’s the biggest canvas I’ve ever painted on, but it 100 percent feels like a Jeff Nichols film, which I’m sure there are gonna be some Alien Nation fans out there that are like, “What the fuck?” But my hope is if they … If people come to it just ready for a new story, that they’ll like it. And I put my heart and soul into it. To be the project that’s supposed to be me being a sell out, it is like the least … I’m not saying that to save face or be cool. I put so much of myself into it, it takes place in Arkansas. There’s so much of me in it.

When you’re making something that big, there’s just so many things that are out of your control. In a weird way, all you can control and concentrate on is the creative aspect. The winds will blow you where they blow you, but as long as you’re telling to where you want to tell, and whenever that stops, then you gotta raise your hand and go, “Guys, this isn’t gonna work for me anymore.”

But so far, that’s not been the case. So hopefully Alien Nation goes, I’ve got a couple of things that I won’t say are more serious films, because Alien Nation is actually pretty serious, but there’s a lot more traditional kind of adult movies. I’ve got a couple of those but I haven’t settled on one, and then I’ve got a really another big PG, PG-13 kind of like summer blockbuster family film, which makes it sound real lame, but it’s not. It’s more like Mud, but with some bigger fantastical elements in it.

It looks like the Disney/Fox merger might have taken down another project in development. In the latest newsletter from TheHollywoodReporter, they reveal that the Alien Nation remake from writer/director Jeff Nicholas is said to be “paused” for the time being.

The remake was in active development with Jeff Nichols, the filmmaker behind such thoughtful fare as Mud, Loving and Midnight Special, writing and directing the project set in a near future where refugees from another planet are relegated to second-class status and a racist L.A. cop has to team up with the force’s first alien detective for a case.

There was even talk of Michael Shannon starring as the alien detective.

But with the recent acquisition of Fox by Disney, Nation is the latest project that is seeing its development cut short. The project is not being put into turnaround (Fox owns the rights as it made not only the 1988 original but a TV series and the TV movies that followed), just “paused,” according to insiders. The project, with its timely themes mixed with ever-popular cop and sci-fi tropes, will very likely be revisited down the road in some capacity.

Mouse Guard was one of the recent projects that got canned and led to director Wes Ball posting a demo reel on YouTube of animation test footage.

Interesting factoid, James Cameron wrote an unused version of the script for the original film.

Hopefully, 20th Century Fox ends up making Alien Nation as it was one of the cooler science fiction films from the late ’80s. It also spawned a television series, which might mean that they might see it better suited for Hulu or FX.

Back in 2016, it was reported that Fox had tapped “Take Shelter” director Jeff Nichols to remake the 1988 sci-fi neo-noir buddy cop film “Alien Nation” which starred James Caan, Mandy Patinkin and Terence Stamp and told the story of a veteran cop and the first extraterrestrial cop working in L.A. Sadly, the project became one of many victims of the Disney acquisition of Fox. Now, Nichols is ready to give “Alien Nation” another go, having turned his script into a 10-episode mini-series he hopes 20th Century Studios greenlights.

During the latest episode of the Team Deakins podcast, Nichols and cinematographer Adam Stone were asked if they’d ever work on TV or a mini-series, which prompted Stone to reveal that he’d talked with Nichols about turning his “Alien Nation” script into a mini-series. “A series can be really flexible for expanding the script, bringing new characters,” Stone said.

Jeff Nichols then confirmed it. “Yeah I’m working on a series rights now,” the filmmaker said. As he tells it, Nichols was approached by Fox a few years ago to remake the 1988 film, and Nichols “spent three years building up an entire alien civilization and this set-up and all the characters. We were set to make it as our next big challenge, a $100 million studio film. Then Disney bought Fox and killed it, which was a little soul-crushing, to say the least.”

Luckily, Disney seems to have realized their mistake. “They came in and asked if I would be interested in turning it into a series, potentially. So I have taken the script and broken it into 10 episodes, and it’s under consideration right now. Who knows, the powers that be are deciding that.”

Now, if Disney can greenlight 15 different “Star Wars” shows, they can afford to let Nichols tell his epic “Alien Nation” TV series.