Paramount+ has ordered an eight-episode series called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, with Daisy Ridley starring and executive producing. Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar winner behind A Beautiful Mind, will write and executive produce. Matt Shakman, who directed WandaVision, is attached as director and executive producer. Jon Jashni is also an executive producer and Derek Thielges is co-producer. Legendary Television is producing with the Irwin Allen estate.
The announcement says the project has been in the works for months, before the recent changes at Paramount+ parent Skydance.
The official logline changes the premise in a big way. Ridley plays Lee Crane, who is “pulled into a classified government program after a catastrophic Arctic expedition claims the life of her twin sister.” At the center of that program is the USS Seaview, described as a retro-futuristic submarine found entombed in the ice, marked with symbols from a history that shouldn’t exist. The sub powers up only when Lee steps aboard. She is thrust into command of a crew and an uneasy alliance with government power brokers, leading missions to contain mysterious forces leaking into our world while uncovering an erased chapter of human history and the once-mythical city of Atlantis.
A quick correction to the framing going around: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is not a Jules Verne book. It is an Irwin Allen original, though it clearly grew out of the Verne tradition of submarine adventure, the world of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Captain Nemo. Allen produced and directed the 1961 feature film, which starred Walter Pidgeon, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden and Peter Lorre, with Robert Sterling in the cast. It became a hit enough that Allen turned it into a television series that ran from 1964 to 1968 with Richard Basehart and David Hedison.
The show followed the crew of the Seaview, a nuclear research submarine commanded by Admiral Harriman Nelson, played by Basehart, with Captain Lee Crane, played by Hedison, as his second-in-command. Each week brought sea monsters, Cold War saboteurs, mad scientists and aliens. It was an adventure show about men on a submarine, and it ran for four seasons.
Allen went on to build a mini empire of 1960s and 70s genre television and disaster films, including Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. His estate has been licensing those properties out ever since.
The new version keeps the name Lee Crane and the Seaview. It turns Crane from a male captain into a woman who gets command because the submarine responds to her. That last detail is the sort of chosen-one setup that has already become a point of contention around its star.
Ridley was cast as Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens after J.J. Abrams went looking for a relative unknown. She auditioned four or five times over seven months. Producer Kathleen Kennedy praised her physicality, self-confidence and optimism.
Within days of the film’s December 2015 release, screenwriter Max Landis posted that they had “made a fan fic movie with a Mary Sue as the main character.” The argument was that Rey, a scavenger who had never left her desert planet, could fly the Millennium Falcon, fix it better than its longtime owner, win a lightsaber duel against a trained Dark Side user and use Jedi mind tricks with no training. Other critics at the time called her a wish-fulfillment character because of her formidable and unrealistic skills, though some of them argued other Star Wars heroes are the same.
The defense came fast. Writers argued that “Mary Sue” carries an inherent gender bias and that Luke Skywalker was never held to the same standard. Abrams said the people “freaking out” were those unaccustomed to seeing a female lead in this kind of film. Ridley herself later called the Mary Sue talk about Rey sexist.
The criticism never went away because the writing of the trilogy kept feeding it. The Last Jedi told fans Rey’s parents were “nobodies.” The Rise of Skywalker then reversed that and made her Palpatine’s granddaughter, ending with her taking the Skywalker name. The sequel trilogy’s director changes and the lack of a plan across the three films are widely blamed for that whiplash. For many fans, the issue is less about Rey being a woman and more about a hero who never fails, never pays a price and gets handed her destiny.
That is the reputation Ridley carries into a series in which a woman is chosen by a submarine that powers on only for her.
Goldsman’s career is a split decision. He won the Oscar and the Golden Globe for adapting A Beautiful Mind, which also won Best Picture, and he wrote The Client, I, Robot, I Am Legend and The Da Vinci Code. He also wrote Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. The latter received overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics and audiences and earned him a Razzie nomination for Worst Screenplay. He later drew another Razzie nomination for the story of Transformers: The Last Knight.
The most relevant entry here is the 1998 Lost in Space movie, which he wrote. It was based on another Irwin Allen series, got mostly negative reviews, and still opened at number one at the box office. So this is not his first time handling an Allen property.
Then there is Star Trek. Goldsman was brought in as producer on Star Trek: Discovery after creator Bryan Fuller left over creative differences, and he is credited as writer on three episodes, including the teleplay for the premiere. Discovery ran five seasons from 2017 to 2024. Its premise had Michael Burnham, a human raised by Vulcans, starting a war between the Federation and the Klingons, and the series went on to make her captain. Many longtime fans rejected the show’s tone, its Burnham-centered storytelling and its departures from established Trek continuity. Jon’s view is that this was a lousy run for Trek, and plenty of fans agree.
Goldsman then co-developed Star Trek: Picard and was credited as writer on five episodes. He is also the co-creator and co-showrunner of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and in fairness that series has been better received than Discovery and Picard among Trek fans, with an episodic format closer to the original show. That is the best argument his defenders have: he can do old-school adventure when the format allows it.
His role on this project is writer and executive producer, so the question is which version of Goldsman shows up.
Matt Shakman directed all nine episodes of WandaVision, which ran on Disney+ from January 15 to March 5, 2021 and was the first series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was also the start of Phase Four.
Here the record cuts against the “trainwreck” label, and it is worth being straight about it. The series was praised by critics for its homages to past sitcoms and for its cast, especially Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany and Kathryn Hahn, and fans dissected it theory by theory as it aired. The criticism landed on the finale, which many viewers felt did not pay off the mystery built across the first eight episodes. Jon’s opinion is that the series was a trainwreck, and the finale is where that argument is strongest.
The more lasting complaint is what the story did to Wanda Maximoff. The series casts her as a grieving woman who traps an entire town under her control and ends with her taking on the Scarlet Witch mantle. Marvel then carried that into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where she became the villain.
What Shakman’s presence means for this project is that the same director who made a Marvel miniseries out of vintage sitcom pastiche is now being handed a vintage 1960s adventure property.
The Seaview was a boys’ adventure about a crew under a veteran admiral. The new version gives command to a woman the submarine chooses, adds a dead twin sister and a government conspiracy, and puts Atlantis behind an erased chapter of human history. Reaction in the comments under the announcement was already blunt, with one reader writing, “Oh dear God, not another reboot for them to ruin.”
Is this a Seaview fans will recognize, or another classic whose name is kept and whose spirit is swapped out? Tell us in the comments.
I feel bad for Daisy Ridley. I feel that she has been typecasted in these kinds of roles. I know she has been vocal in the past about sexism and whatnot, however, for reasons now unknown to me, I feel like she was commanded by her masters to do so. Her roles in “Cleaner” and “Murder on the Orient Express” showed a feminine and vulnerable side to her performance in my opinion.
Akiva was once a good writer. Perhaps he can be again. But this...I dunno