As we predicted yesterday, despite Eli Roth talking up a “Thanksgiving” full length feature, it will probably never happen (or go direct-to-DVD) probably because he’s not Robert Rodriguez and, as he told Cinemablend, he and co-writer Jeff Rendell “always wind up talking about girls from high school and going on Facebook and screwing around,” rather than getting any work done.
Speaking with AICN, Roth reveals what is much more likely to be his next project, his long gestating sci-fi flick “Endangered Species.” First revealed in the spring of 2009, the film is described as being in the vein of “Transformers” or “Cloverfield,” saying at the time that the source of the destruction that will rain down upon the Earth, “is not aliens or robots or a virus – it’s a little more grounded. But when people hear it they are going to be like ‘That is going to be insane!’.”
It certainly sounds like his most ambitious — and priciest — project to date. As he tells Capone, “[‘Endangered Species’] is a tricky film; it’s going to be an expensive movie, so any changes I want to make, I want to make them on the page as opposed to shooting and then re-shooting or fixing them in editing. It’s not like I can just shoot and shoot and figure it out later; this thing has to be mapped out very, very carefully.”
It definitely sounds like he’s taking the right approach, and certainly, to get any kind of studio money, he’d likely have to pitch them a completely realized vision than a brief outline. And while we got some grief yesterday for ragging on Roth, we will say that this project sounds like something that might elevate him from the forgettable B-rate horror he tends to lend his name to.
Obviously, this one is still a way off but you can get your fix this weekend when the Roth-produced horror film “The Last Exorcism” hits theaters.