Daisy Ridley is going back to a franchise universe. It just happens to be underwater.
Ridley will star as Lee Crane in a new ‘Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’ series in development at Paramount+, a reimagining of Irwin Allen’s 1961 film and the ABC series that ran from 1964 to 1968. She will also executive produce, her first time leading a television series.
The new take reworks the premise around its star. Lee Crane is a brilliant ocean scientist pulled into a classified government program after a catastrophic Arctic expedition claims the life of her twin sister. At the center of the program is the USS Seaview, a retro-futuristic submarine found entombed in the ice and marked with symbols from a history that should not exist. The vessel powers up only when Lee steps aboard. Thrust into command of a pressure-cooker crew and an uneasy alliance with government power brokers, she leads the Seaview on undersea missions to contain mysterious forces leaking into the world, while uncovering an erased chapter of human history that runs through the lost city of Atlantis.
The creative team is heavyweight. Akiva Goldsman (‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’) is writing, with a writers’ room now open, and Matt Shakman (‘WandaVision,’ ‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’) will direct. Goldsman, Shakman and Ridley executive produce alongside Jon Jashni, with Derek Thielges as co-producer. Legendary Television produces with the Irwin Allen estate. The series is planned as an eight-episode season and, per Variety, was in development for months before the Paramount and Warner Bros. merger closed.
The project is the first to land from the plan Goldsman and Legendary announced in February 2025, to reimagine three of Allen’s classic series: ‘Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,’ ‘The Time Tunnel’ and ‘Land of the Giants.’ Allen’s ‘Lost in Space’ already proved the model works, running three seasons as a Netflix reboot.
For Ridley, the casting is the story. Cast as Rey in ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ after a handful of small British television roles, she carried a $2 billion film and a trilogy, and her announced return as Rey has been in limbo ever since. The post-’Star Wars’ years brought strong work in smaller films and one announced series, an Agatha Christie drama in 2022, that never materialized. ‘Voyage’ changes the shape of her career: a series lead who is also an executive producer, with a writers’ room being built around her. Lee Crane was played by David Hedison in the original series, as the Seaview’s commanding officer. Making Crane a scientist whose connection to the ship is the mystery itself turns a command role into the show’s central performance, and it puts Ridley, not the effects, at the center of the franchise.
No premiere date is set. The series is in development, and the next news will be the rest of the cast.
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