Happy 4th! We’ll keep this brief because there’s #MURICA times to be had. You’ll recall that back in 2011, Guillermo del Toro announced that his long-gestating adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At The Mountains Of Madness” had been killed by Universal. The studio was apparently in love with the project, but didn’t like the financial-recouping prospect of a $120+ million movie with an R rating, so they shuttered the project.
As early as last year, Del Toro did say he would try to mount the project again, and now the “Pacific Rim” filmmaker is suggesting he could make it at his “new home” at Legendary Pictures. And of course, he’s now willing to do it at a PG-13 rating.
“I said to them, that’s the movie that I would really love to do one day, and it’s still expensive,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I think that now, with the way I’ve seen PG-13 become more and more flexible, I think I could do it PG-13 now, so I’m going to explore it with [Legendary], to be as horrifying as I can, but to not be quite as graphic.”
“There’s basically one or two scenes in the book that people don’t remember that are pretty graphic,” he continued. “Namely, for example, the human autopsy that the aliens do, which is a very shocking moment. But I think I can find ways of doing it. We’ll see. It’s certainly a possibility in the future. Legendary was very close to doing it at one point, so I know they love the screenplay. So, we’ll see. Hopefully it’ll happen. It’s certainly one of the movies I would love to do.”
That definitely sounds fairly hopeful anyhow.
As for “Pacific Rim 2,” which now has a 2017 release date and also backed by Legendary, Del Toro suggested the sequel will be quite its own beast. “I don’t want to spoil it, but I think at the end of the second movie, people will find out that the two movies stand on their own,” he explained. “They’re very different from each other, although hopefully bringing the same joyful giant spectacle. But the tenor of the two movies will be quite different.”
See you in about three years.
