Ava DuVernay might have turned down the offer to direct Marvel's Black Panther, but that doesn't mean the Selma director has necessarily turned her back on big summer movies. According to The Hollywood Reporter, DuVernay is being offered the chance to direct Intelligent Life, a "sci-fi thriller" about a UN worker that falls in love with an alien, to be produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment. The movie's script has already been written by Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow and his regular writing partner Derek Connolly, while Lupita Nyong'o — fresh off the back of a heavily computer-generated appearance in The Force Awakens — is reportedly in talks to play the alien at the center of the movie.

DuVernay is also linked to Disney's A Wrinkle in Time, a film adaptation of the children's book by Madelein L'Engle, but The Hollywood Reporter says the director has space in her schedule to do both movies. Her connection with Trevorrow also lends more weight to the reports — after the Jurassic World director invited criticism last year by saying that "many of the top female directors" didn't want to make studio blockbusters, he told The Verge that he hoped his friend would maybe tackle a big genre movie. "I constantly urge Ava DuVernay to take on, not necessarily a franchise or one of these things," Trevorrow said last June, "but to test the limits of what she's capable of because I think she's truly great."