Ice Cube Leads a Data-Age Alien Invasion in Prime Video’s ‘War of the Worlds’

H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds gets another modern overhaul, this time with Ice Cube, cyber-surveillance, and an alien threat that’s more digital than Martian. Prime Video has locked in a global release date of July 30 for the new adaptation directed by Timur Bekmambetov and produced alongside Patrick Aiello.

Cube stars as Will Radford, a Homeland Security cyber analyst who monitors threats through a national surveillance program. But when a mysterious global attack kicks off, Radford starts to suspect that the government may be hiding more than just intel. It’s a timely shift for the legendary alien invasion story, one that replaces Victorian battlefields with smartphone screens and mass data streams.

“The idea was organic,” producer Patrick Aiello told Deadline. “When catastrophes happen today, we experience them through our devices. That insight shaped the storytelling and tech used to create this immersive thriller.”

War of the Worlds unfolds through the perspective of phones, laptops, and tablets. “For the first time ever, a studio-scale sci-fi epic has been produced using a format that places audiences inside the action,” said Aiello, “in a language and format that is now natural within our daily lives.”

Bekmambetov sees clear parallels to the story’s history. “It’ll be exciting for audiences to watch the movie and ask themselves: If aliens invaded today, how would we experience it? Most likely, we’d be watching it on our phones,” he told Deadline. “In that way, it’s kind of a modern spin on Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. Back then, he used radio, the most popular technology of the time, to make people believe the invasion was real.”

Bekmambetov has form, his digital thrillers Unfriended, Searching, and Missing earned over $200 million collectively. His latest feature, LifeHack, premiered at SXSW and sits at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.

With Ice Cube on screen and a dystopian backdrop of data-driven fear, this reboot taps directly into today’s techno-paranoia. Whether it lands with audiences like Spielberg’s 2005 version remains to be seen. But one thing’s certain, aliens aren’t just coming for our planet this time. They want our data too.

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