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Producer Simon Kinberg Updates Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Elysium

Simon Kinberg is best known as a screenwriter, having written the scripts for 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand and 2009's Sherlock Holmes, but Kinberg also works as a producer, with several projects in the works, including X-Men: First Class, the upcoming adaptation of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and secret, sci-fi movie Elysium.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was adapted by Seth Grahame-Smith from his novel and is currently being directed by Timur Bekmambetov. The story posits the former U.S. President as a master vampire slayer who lost his own mother to the undead. The story is an amusingly dark one, and Kinberg told io9 that the movie version will be a "dark and gory" one.

It's hacking people's heads off and killing vampires left and right. The main character has an axe, with which he kills countless amounts of vampires. It's a dark, cool, edgy, twisted movie. I don't know what the rating will be, but I suspect that the rating would be an R. I suspect it will be an R just because there's a lot of murder and decapitation.

Kinberg says that the movie is a little different from the book, but "the story is very much intact" because Grahame-Smith was the one to adapt his own book into a screenplay "so anything that deviated from the book is in his hands."

But for the most part it really is the story from the book. We have this great actor named Ben Walker playing Lincoln. He was in a play on Broadway, he was incredible in it. He happens to be 6'4" and look just like Lincoln, but he's really spectacular in the film. And if you've read the book you know that it spans decades. So watching him evolve and get older and mature and eventually die, I'm not giving anything away there.

Elysium is director Neill Blomkamp's follow-up to his 2009 sci-fi debut District 9 that stars Matt Damon and Jodie Foster. Story details on Elysium have been scarce, though it is known that the movie is set in the future and, like District 9, will explore sociopolitical themes. Kinberg couldn't give away too many details, but said that "visually, stylistically [Elysium]'s actually very different than District 9" and that is "not necessarily an alien movie."

It's a unique movie. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before. I can't tell you what the big themes are, but I can tell you that there are big themes. [Blomkamp]'s someone who's really interested in the world. He's not a filmmaker who's only interested in other movies. He's somebody who's interested in the politics of the world, the reality of the world. Whatever kind of movie he makes in whatever genre, it's never simply going to be a synthetic movie about the movies he liked growing up. It's always going to be about something bigger, and this movie is too.