Koepp has written his share of tentpole films. He wrote the first two Jurassic Park films. the first Mission Impossible film, the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man and unfortunately Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Heh. But we can see from his past work that he can go big and by the description below Sony needs someone who can handle big visions.
The novel revolves around a secret project to assemble the ancient body parts of a giant humanoid relic buried throughout the world by aliens. It's discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where a young girl named Rose Franklin falls into a huge hole and literally lands in the palm of a giant metal hand. The government swarms, but loses interest after failing to gain any military or technological secrets. By the time it's demilitarized years later, that young girl is a physicist with the University of Chicago and she spearheads the building project after other body parts are discovered around the U.S. She tries all this covertly in an underground facility in Denver but when her project goes public, the paranoia and greed push mankind to the brink of world war, even as its researchers puzzle over whether they are reviving a weapon of mass destruction or something else.
The Themis Files is the debut novel from Quebecois writer Sylvain Neuvel. A little digging will uncover that Neuvel has his Ph.D in Linguistics. His personal website reads, "My main interests are word-based morphology, computational morphology, as well as formal and lexical semantics and most of my current work focuses on a formal characterization of polysynthesis, compounding and agglutination in word-based morphological terms". He also likes toys and robots apparently. It is a nice balance.
And while I have no clue what all that linguistic stuff means Neuvel has written a novel that Sony is very excited about adapting to the big screen. Koepp gets the first stab at adapting it. We will see if his draft sticks or if Sony brings in someone afterwards.