After the success of last year’s Gladiator II, which grossed $461 million worldwide and became one of the highest-grossing films of the director’s career, Ridley Scott has already begun work on his follow-up film. Titled The Dog Stars, the film is set to feature a star-studded cast, including Jacob Elordi, Margeret Qualley, Josh Brolin, and Guy Pierce. The film is an adaptation of the 2012 novel by the same name, written by Peter Heller. The adaptation will be written by Mark L. Smith, whose other writing credits include The Revenant, last year’s Twisters, and the recently released Netflix series American Primeval.

The film follows Elordi in the starring role, playing Hig, a pilot living in Colorado after a pandemic wipes out most of the world’s population. The film’s official synopsis reads:

“Hig’s wife is gone, his friends are dead, and he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, Jasper, and a mercurial, gun-toting misanthrope named Bangley.

But when a random transmission beams through the radio of his 1956 Cessna, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him 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, only to find something that is both better and worse than anything he could ever hope for.”

Brolin is set to play Bangley. Qualley will play Cima, an intern doctor, while Guy Pierce will play Cima’s father. Both Brolin and Pierce have worked with Ridley Scott, appearing in Scott’s previous films, American Gangster and Prometheus.

Production is set to begin in April of this year in the Dolomite region of Italy, which will stand in for the Great Plains and the Rockies. No release date for the film has been announced at this time.