Paul Mescal and Ridley Scott Reteam on "The Dog Stars"

As “Gladiator II” barrels towards theaters, Ridley Scott and Paul Mescal have already found their next collaboration in the movie “The Dog Stars” for the 20th Century, with Mescal in advance negotiations to star.

Scott will work with Steve Asbell and the 20th Century Studios team to bring the film, adapted by Mark L Smith from Peter Heller’s apocalyptic thriller, to life. 

Smith, Cliff Roberts and Scott’s film and television production vehicle Scott Free are producing.

“The Dog Stars” follows a civilian pilot lives a lonely life on an abandoned Colorado airbase with his dog and a tough ex-Marine, in a near future where an unnamed pandemic has decimated American society. The two men couldn’t be more mismatched but depend on each other to fend off roaming invaders. When a random transmission beams through the radio of his 1956 Cessna, the voice ignites a hope deep inside the pilot that a better life exists outside their tightly controlled perimeter. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return and follows its static-broken trail.

Mescal, who portrays the gladiator Lucius in Scott’s forthcoming “Gladiator II,” praised the director in an interview with Variety at the film’s Tokyo premiere “There’s no better director for focusing on an audience’s sense of entertainment than Ridley Scott,” he said.

Scott was similarly effusive of Mescal in an interview with The New York Times this week, telling the outlet, “Paul is very smart, so all he’s got to do is get over the scale of what I’m going to walk him into. When I walked him onto the set of Rome in Malta, I said, ‘You’ll get over this in two hours. This is all for you, this is all for me. Let’s go and make this together.’ That was it. Part of my job is to make light of it.”