Earlier today we were speculating what the next project from genre filmmaker Guillermo del Toro would be. He said at Comic-Con that it would be in 3D and that it would be “scary.” The project that Deadline is breaking will be his next certainly falls into both categories.
It seems his long, long, long-in-the-works adaptation of the slender HP Lovecraft adventure/ horror novel “At The Mountains of Madness” will be the director’s next project. It’ll be shot in 3D and produced for Universal Pictures. The story goes (and is alluded to in the Deadline piece), that when del Toro came over to Universal to do the outstanding superhero fairy tale “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” Universal purchased the rights to “At the Mountains of Madness” from DreamWorks, where it was previously developed, to lure del Toro away from making “The Hobbit” films next. Well, now that “The Hobbit” has fallen through, “At The Mountains of Madness” moves forward.
The big story in all of this is that James Cameron, undisputed King of Pandora, will be producing the tale, which concerns an arctic expedition in the 1930s that uncovers something otherworldly. Hopefully the book’s underlying anti-semitism has been cut out, leaving nothing but good, old fashioned spookhouse fun. Cameron doesn’t throw his name out there willy-nilly, but he is willing to help out filmmakers whose genre projects need a little extra clout like Steven Soderbergh‘s overlooked “Solaris” remake at Fox, and ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow‘s apocalyptic “Strange Days” for the same studio, the latter for which he is also wrote.
Hopefully production will get underway next year and we’ll all have a smart, brawny tentpole movie that is actually worth looking forward to.