Visionary director Alfonso Cuarón was supposed to have a new film come out this year (his first since Children of Men), but Warner Bros. pushed the ridiculously enticing Gravity to 2013 to allow for more post-production work on the effects heavy sci-fi feature.  As such, we likely won’t be seeing a new Cuarón property until awards season of next year, but the director isn’t content to just sit idle in the meantime.  The Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban director has committed to produce and direct a new supernatural TV series for NBC alongside the unendingly prolific J.J. Abrams.  Hit the jump for more details on the project.

Reaching back into the 80′s for feature film remakes, reboots and adaptation has been quite the tradition over the past few years in Hollywood, but in a turn of events, it looks like a film from the 80′s is heading to the small screen in the form of a TV series adaptation. Deadline reports NBC is working with The Forgotten series creator Mark Friedman and director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum) to adapt Robert Zemeckis’ 1984 action adventure film Romancing the Stone for a new TV series. However, Levy’s involvement as director is subject to his schedule directing feature films.

The original film followed a romance writer (Kathleen Turner) who sets off to Colombia to ransom her kidnapped sister, and soon finds herself in the middle of a dangerous adventure alongside a swashbuckling American bird exporter (Michael Douglas). The series will change things up a bit by following a successful but unfulfilled woman who teams with a risk-taking adventurer to take on weekly missions while on a larger quest to find her missing brother. The idea of weekly missions happening while the over-arcing plot runs through the whole series seems a bit too formulaic for my tastes, and I’d just as soon wish they would just leave the Romancing the Stone title off the series to quell any expectations fans and children of the 80′s who grew up with the film might have.