Guillermo del Toro has drawers full of lost and unmade movies, but perhaps the crown jewel of them all is “At The Mountains Of Madness.” I’ll keep the history brief, but the filmmaker struggled to bring the H.P. Lovecraft adaptation to the big screen, and managed to get what looked like a killer set of an ingredients: star Tom Cruise, and producer James Cameron. It looked like it would be enough to greenlight the $150 million budgeted movie, that would’ve carried an R-rating, but Universal lacked the will to take the risk and yanked the cord in 2011. For a few years after, del Toro kept some hope alive, saying he’d still try to get it made, and said he’d even be willing to do a PG-13 version, and it now sounds like he should’ve been more willing to bend on the rating from the start.
Speaking with Collider, del Toro was candid about the collapse of the movie, and admitted trying to make something R-rated proved to be the thing that ultimately felled ‘Mountains.’
“A lot of people think of directors like Caesar sitting on a chaise lounge like somebody feeding them grapes, and you say, ‘I would like to do Mountains of Madness now.’ And it’s not. You’re a blue collar guy working your way, putting numbers in front of studios, putting [together] stars, packages, whatever, and you have your stuff to move. That’s why I tried to do a small movie and a big movie, because the small movies, you suffer with the budget, but you have complete freedom; you can do whatever you want. That gives you a line,” he said.
“We thought we had a very good, safe package. It was $150 [million], Tom Cruise and James Cameron producing, ILM doing the effects, here’s the art, this is the concept, because I really think big-scale horror would be great … but there was a difference of opinion; the studio didn’t think so,” del Toro added. “The R [rating] was what made it. If ‘Mountains’ had been PG-13, or I had said PG-13 … I’m too much of a Boy Scout, I should have lied, but I didn’t.”
Well, at least del Toro came away having learned something, though it was at the cost of his passion project. It sounds like he’s moved on, but the director still has the extensive concept art kicking around, so who knows, maybe sometime down the road he’ll be ready to try and make it happen again.