11 MORE Movies That Led To Other Movies Being Cancelled (And Why)
7. Prometheus Levelled Guillermo Del Toro Mountains Of Madness
You could write an entire article based solely on the amount of projects that Guillermo Del Toro has attached himself to over the years that have never been made, but with the exception of Hellboy III the one that fans lament the most is his failure to get H.P. Lovecraft adaptation At the Mountains of Madness into production.
Del Toro had spent years trying to convince the studio to green-light his mega-budget fantasy epic, and at one point even had James Cameron set to produce and Tom Cruise pegged to star as geologist William Dyler, with the filmmaker hoping that two proven box office draws would be enough to secure the all-clear.
GDT's insistence that a novella often deemed as unfilmable be given an R-rating hardly eased their concerns, and just three months before At the Mountains of Madness was due to start shooting the plug was abruptly pulled. The following year, the Pan's Labyrinth director admitted that Ridley Scott's Prometheus played a huge role in the demise of his latest passion project.
According to Del Toro, the clear Lovecraftian influence that had always been a part of the Alien franchise wasn't the main issue, or even the visual and aesthetic similarities, but it was the fact that the two scripts shared a virtually identical premise and big third-act reveal that made At the Mountains of Madness a non-starter.