With the release of After Earth last year, it seemed that M. Night Shyamalan was essentially guaranteed to break his string of box office flops by banking on the star power Will Smith and his son Jaden. Incredibly, that movie also tanked, earning just $60 million domestically on a $130 million budget (although it did somewhat better internationally). Clearly his career is not in a great place right now and he desperately needs to find a way to reinvent himself in order to win back the respect of critics and moviegoers. It would appear that his solution will be to reteam with the man who headlined his first two major hits: Bruce Willis. Not only that, but he is also returning to the kinds of movies that started his career as opposed to the genre films that made him a household name.

According to Deadline, M. Night Shyamalan is in talks to reteam with Bruce Willis for a movie called Labor Of Love, based on one of the first scripts he ever sold in Hollywood. The project was originally set up at Fox back in 1993 but it never got made because Shyamalan wanted to direct it himself and he didn’t have the clout to do it. Now the project is being financed by Emmett/Furla/Oasis (Lone Survivor), but it does not yet have a distributor lined up. The plot is described as follows:

“Willis will play a Philadelphia book store owner who loses the love of his life in a tragic accident. Never big on words, he becomes haunted by the notion that he never properly told his wife how much he loved her. Since she once asked if he would walk across the country for her, he decides to show her posthumously just how much he did love her.”

So yeah… no supernatural stuff and (probably) no twist endings. It seems to be more in line with his first two films, Praying with Anger and Wide Awake, both of which were stories of self-discovery and spiritual awakening. It sounds like pretty sappy and sentimental stuff to me, but I guess at this point it’s time for him to try to capture a different audience. Do you have any interest in seeing M. Night Shyamalan’s Labor of Love and could this help revitalize his career?