Having wasted millions on the four year production of
The Wolfman, Universal are about to admit they wasted two hours of our lives too by remaking the classic horror
yet again, only 16 months after the first remake was released. It's the usual modern day Hollywood trick of conveniently re-writing history and pretending a miserable failure just never happened, but rarely is the turn-a-round so quick.
Moviehole say
Michael Tabb (writer of this forgotten
'gem') has turned in a fresh screenplay that 'shares a link' to the original
George Waggner 1941 black and white classic The Wolf Man. Perhaps a sequel of sorts to the original
Lon Chaney Jr starrer? The working title
Werewolf is being branded around the studio, and meetings with potential directors will happen over the next few weeks. Amazingly, the film could go in front of camera's as early as this fall which for the newly cautious outfit (they have stopped financing risky $100 million tentpoles) is an eye-brow raising move considering the never-ending problems they had with the last movie. It doesn't seem to make much business sense to jump back into the woods with The Wolf Man again after losing so much money, and indeed to rush a project so quickly go in front of camera's sounds daft. And this whole 'sharing a link' to a movie that celebrates it's 70th anniversary this year seems unwise... how many regular movie-goers who would be interested in a CGI heavy monster horror in 2012/13 actually saw the original on it's first run? The only thing I can think of is that Universal are going to go incredibly low-budget, perhaps even with a borderline straight-to-video production that tries to match what worked in the classic (can we hope for a 'man in suit?') but I could be wrong. Perhaps this is a major Universal production and maybe they are thinking there's plenty of mileage left in the hairy beasts with two more
Twilight movies on the way and the
Teen Wolf series just kicking off at MTV. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsrFMBWRC1M After the disastrous Wolfman film of last year where original director
Mark Romanek was kicked off for having too many good ideas and I doubt
Joe Johnston had much control over the creative as his replacement, can we really expect a notable Hollywood director or artist to be interested in this? Universal's tight grip on all the important decisions will make this impossible. Universal would be better off working on their other iconic line-up of monsters if they are desperate to tap into the Gothic characters that put them on the map. Why not give
David Goyer a call and get moving
on that Invisible Man remake? That's what I would be doing.... As Einstein once said - those who repeat the same action over and over again expecting different results is the definition of Insanity. Anyone else not think that is apt here?