What (if any) is the current status of the "Forever War" movie?

The very short answer is that this film seems to be, finally, heading out of development hell after more than 25 years since its first option.

• It's been re-optioned at a pretty high cost by Warner Bros.

• The studio have confirmed a director (Ridley Scott), lead actor (Channing Tatum), screenwriter (Jon Spaihts)

• Experience suggests that we should expect an announcement on an actual filming date within the next 1-2 years at most (once schedules line up) with a view to seeing the film before 2022

Screenwriter (Oct 2018)

Q. I know there might not be much you can say about this, but do you have any updates on the Ridley Scott Forever War adaptation?

JS: I haven't heard anything in years. That doesn't mean people aren't working on it. Movie producers have less than no interest in communicating with fiction writers who might incidentally have written a book related to their movie.

_{^{Interview: Sci-Fi Grand Master Joe Haldeman Talks Adaptation and Simulation}}

Screenwriter (Dec 2016)

CS [Coming Soon] caught up with Spaihts this week and learned that The Forever War movie remains in very active development. “I’m working on it every day right now,” he tells us. “It was delayed a little bit, unfortunately, by the incredible time commitment that ‘Passengers’ became. That’s the way in which I was bitten by the depth of my involvement in the production and post-production of ‘Passengers,’ but ‘The Forever War’ is easily in my top five favorite sci-fi novels of all time.”

_{^{The Forever War movie will bring to the big screen Joe Haldeman’s classic sci-fi novel}}

Writer (Aug 2017)

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to Joe Haldeman myself about "The Forever War film. He told me that he himself was not too sure of the production's progress, though Warner Bros. did pay him a good sum for the rights. (He also mentioned that the wheat fields in Alien: Covenant looked strikingly like those in his novel!)

_{^{What happened to Ridley Scott's The Forever War?}}

Studio (Apr 2015)

Warner Bros outbid Sony late Thursday after a spirited negotiation and is now in business with a new possible franchise, The Forever War with Channing Tatum on board to star. The script is being penned by Jon Spaihts and will be based on Joe Haldeman’s book. Richard Edlund had the rights to the book for 27 years, and it had been at Fox for the past seven with Ridley Scott, but after several scripts, it never made it to the big screen. Hopefully, this time, the 41-year-old classic sci-fi novel — said to be one of the best books of the genre — finally will get made.

_{^{Warner Bros Wins Battle For Channing Tatum’s ‘The Forever War’}}