Movies
‘Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’ Remake Finds Its First Resident
For those of you Guillermo del Toro purists out there, the first official casting came in this evening for Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a thriller for Miramax Films that was scripted by Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins. Beyond the break you see who will star in the latest big budget Hollywood remake going into production this summer under the helm of Troy Nixey.
Katie Holmes (Batman Begins) will star in “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” a thriller for Miramax Films that was scripted by Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins, writes the Hollywood Reporter.
Del Toro is producing with Mark Johnson and the film will be directed by del Toro protege Troy Nixey.
Some interesting news is that the film will shoot this summer in Melbourne as a “Guillermo del Toro Presentation.”
“Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” is based on a 1973 ABC telepic about a young girl who moves in with her father and his girlfriend and discovers they are sharing the house with devilish creatures.
Nixey, a comicbook artist, is making his feature directing debut. Del Toro sparked to “Latchkey’s Lament,” a Nixey-directed short that captured the tone del Toro wanted for “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.”
Del Toro and Johnson are also teamed with Gary Ungar to produce “Hater,” an adaptation of the David Moody horror novel that will be directed at Universal by Juan Antonio Bayona (“The Orphanage”).
Holmes most recently completed “The Extra Man,” directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini.
Del Toro is busy readying “The Hobbit,” which he’s writing with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. That film shoots next year.
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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