Determined to turn another baker’s dozen into some Oscar nomination, Apollo 13 director Ron Howard is reportedly gearing up to direct Thirteen Lives, a film about the Tham Luang cave rescue.
A massive news story back in those now laughably halcyon days of 2018, the rescue saw an international effort of thousands come together to rescue a Thai junior soccer team that had become trapped in a flooded cave. As with every disaster in our modern hellscape, Elon Musk also managed to make himself part of the story with some hollow promises.
It’s certainly a story worth telling—it’s just that there are already three other filmmakers doing so. Crazy Rich Asians director John M. Chu has a cave rescue miniseries in the works at Netflix, Free Solo Oscar-winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have a dramatization set up at Universal, and Kevin MacDonald has a documentary in the works for NatGeo. But apparently Gladiator writer William Nicholson and Howard thought they needed their own version, just in case Russell Crowe wants to play a Thai Navy SEAL.
