Movies
Jessica Biel Offered Lead Role in ‘Total Recall’ Redo
After carousing a list of potential female leads, Variety is reporting that Sony Pictures may be close to landing Jessica Biel (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blade: Trinity) for one of two female leads for its Total Recall reboot.
Biel is circling a role opposite Colin Farrell in the pic. Sony has offered her the role but no discussions are underway. It’s unclear which role she would play.
In the original 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger starrer, the femme leads were played by Sharon Stone, who played Lori, and Rachel Ticotin, who played Melina.
The film follows Douglas Quaid, a man who believes he is a secret agent and ends up on a Martian colony where he fights to overthrow a ruler controlling the production of air.
There was early buzz that Biel was going for the role of Melina but sources say there’s a chance she going for the other character.
Len Wiseman will direct the latest version, with Farrell stepping into the Schwarzenegger role and Bryan Cranston attached to play the villain. James Vanderbilt penned the screenplay.
Based on a Philip K. Dick short story, the original pic was directed by Paul Verhoeven. It grossed more than $250 million at the worldwide box office.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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