Post by masterofallgoons on Jun 3, 2020 13:14:40 GMT
I heard an interview with Del Toro recently where he said he had pitched a remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon to Universal years prior that was essentially the story of The Shape of Water. He realized that Universal wasn't gonna do it so he changed some things up and made a more original take on the same plot. But his idea was that he would remake it as a love story with the Gill Man being a romantic lead of sorts in a Beauty and the Beast kinda way.
There are some details out there about the Romero and Barker versions of The Mummy. Both would have been interesting, but the Barker stuff sounds so perverse and weird. I don't know how close they got to pre production, but they definitely had outlines and I think early drafts of scripts.
I'm sure this still happens, but it seemes rampant at the time that studios would hire these filmmakers known for their crazy stuff and then be shocked when they'd come up with a crazy idea when they were hired to do that in the first place.
I like the remake with Brendan Fraser, or at least I did when it came out (the sequels were horrible). I haven't seen it in a while, but the sorta Indiana Jones-ish approach makes sense and they got to make a family friendly monster movie.
But the way to find a unique spin on this was to let someone like Clive Barker bring his weird and perverse thematic fucked-up-itude to it.
They're on a better path now, it seems, where they're starting by hiring good filmmakers and it seems that they're letting them do what they want instead of saddling them with the issues that come with making a movie for a 'shared universe.' Leigh Whanell did a good job with a new, and sort of unrelated version of The Invisible Man, and I'm not sure what approach she is taking, but I'm curious about the Karyn Kusama Dracula. I loved The Invitation, so she's cool in my book. No announcement yet on who would be directing this remake of The Wolf Man, but I would think that with Ryan Gosling already on board they'll certainly have interest from name directors.
I never saw the original, but this is how I would have done it. The Creature should be a lochness monster type deal where there’s rumors that it exists and a team goes out to search for it.
It’s kind of frustrating it took so many tries to get the universe going. I didn’t even know it was supposed to start with the Wolfman remake. I thought officially Dracula Untold was where it was officially supposed to start. I’m glad it’s on the right track though. The Mummy with Tom Cruise can fuck off!!
The Shape of Water isn't my favorite Del Toro film, but there's a lot of his signature brilliance in there, including maybe the greatest practical makeup effects ever done, which you just know Universal would have wanted to do with CGI. He conceived his movie as a love story from the beginning, and Universal almost certainly would have wanted the monster to be more monstrous and villainous, so I guess it wasn't going to happen with Del Toro anyway. But now I'd guess they'll stay away from that one for a while. That and The Mummy will be the least likely to be remade for years to come. The Mummy because the previous one was such a massive failure, and the Creature because it will be really difficult to not remind people of The Shale of Water.
Maybe I wasn't clear before, but The Wolfman was not the start of the 'dark universe.' I just thought that it should have been. Even though it wasn't a big hit, I just thought it set a better tone and laid out the aesthetics of what a Universal monster movie should look like so much better than anything that followed.
Offically Dracula Untold was their first attempt, then that failed and was scrapped, then The Mummy was the next huge attempt and they had all of these other movies connected to it that were all greenlit and in vary stages of preproduction already that were then shut down when The Mummy failed so miserably and the shuttered that whole department of Universal.
Now they're on a better track (so far, even though there's only been one new one), and part of that is that they're not concerning themselves with connecting the movies. They're making each of these things individually. They may, at some point, try to find a way to connect them later on, but they aren't being conceived of that way. That would be a little more like the way Universal started doing those crossover movies in the 40s and 50s.
I still think Penny Dreadful did that the best. If only it had been allowed to carry it through.