Chud.com reports that he's in talks to direct a movie called Flight, about an airline pilot who becomes a hero after a successful emergency landing, but he's wracked by guilt afterwards because he was (unbeknownst to the general public, it seems) on drink and drugs at the time. Denzel Washington may play the lead, who also has another interesting-sounding thriller on the way at the moment, Safe House.
To me the real news is that Zemeckis is intending to drop the motion capture technology. He's been a technological pioneer since he hit big with the time-travelling DeLorean, but his recent output has left me cold, and his apparent goal of making photo-real CG humans looks no closer to being realised now than it did when he made The Polar Express. His last live action film was Cast Away in 2000 - no classic, perhaps, but certainly a very good film, and far better than anything he's made since then (though I haven't seen his A Christmas Carol). The final straw for Disney, his backers, has been the complete failure of Mars Needs Moms, a recent mocap effort which Zemeckis produced.
Zemeckis, at his best, is a true visionary, and I firmly believe he has shown the talent in the past to forge a career similar in standing to Steven Spielberg's. Now his experimentation in digital toys is (hopefully) out of the way, he can get back to making great movies again.
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