Guillermo del Toro is pulling the plug on his much-hyped, hugely anticipated Mountains of Madness project, which is bad news for fans of del Toro’s work and bad news for fans of the Cthulhu Mythos—not to mention bad news for Tom Cruise, for whom the part of William Dyer would have been a golden opportunity to unleash the crazy. Supposedly del Toro finally walked because Universal insisted on an audience-friendly PG-13 rating. Universal hasn’t had an authentic hit since roughly the Jurassic Park era (the movies, not the geological period, although Universal finds the resemblance uncomfortably close), and that PG-13 seemed necessary if they wanted to pull in the $500 million global box office they saw in this project. Del Toro thought he needed the freedom of an R to “make it really, really uncomfortable and nasty,” so he walked away from the tweener audience and the potential Happy Meals merchandise tie-in and called it quits, saying: “Madness has gone dark. The ‘R’ did us in.” Last word on the subject goes to Christopher Rosen at Movieline:
…[T]he system at large is flawed right now, and it’s a sucker’s game. It is as bad right now as it’s ever been, or at least in the 20 years I’ve been in Los Angeles. … For this to be fixed, it’s going to take a lot more than one mega-budget horror film either getting made or not getting made. It’s going to take a major paradigm shift in what gets sold, how it gets sold, and what audiences reward with their viewing dollars.
On the plus side, Universal remains absolutely committed to that Ouija Board movie due out in
November 2012—just one of a whole suite of movies based on Hasbro® board games! With a roster like that, the studio’s place in cinema history seems secure.
7 comments
Mountains of Madness is a flawed but great story, & could make a good movie with some alterations. But maybe not in Hollywood
I don’t honestly see what they could have done that would have given it an R rating; nothing authentic to the story, actually. I’ve been working on a version of this to perform as a play, and there’s not only no nudity, but everyone walks around in full length parkas for the whole thing. There isn’t even a female character in it, not one.
What were they gonna do, write in a necrophiliac/bestiality scene when they find the sled?
[...] Universal Studios > Cthulhu??? (AgentBedhead) [...]
[...] Universal Studios > Cthulhu??? (AgentBedhead) [...]
In fairness, del Toro made it clear he wasn’t planning to sex up the story or drop a few F-bombs. But he felt that a genuinely terrifying screen adaptation needed a level of violence and gruesomeness that made an ‘R’ rating highly probable–a bit like Carpenter’s The Thing, to pick another South Pole horrorshow.
The Thing was based on this story, actually. But there isn’t really any gruesomeness except in the second-last scene. That’s the thing about Lovecraft: it’s all implied or slowly discovered to have happened in the past. Except right at the end, where the great evil takes over and we all go gibbering mad.
You can read it here:
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/mountainsofmaddness.htm
The Thing was based on this story, actually.
Sorta, mebbe. The movie was actually based on John Campbell’s 1938 story “Who Goes There?” which might or might not have been inspired by Lovecraft’s 1936 AtMoM (critics still argue about this). Campbell’s style and general outlook on life were very different from Lovecraft’s–but you could say that about practically everybody.
/nerdcloak off