Movies
Inside Directors to Tone Down the Violence in ‘Livid’
Back in April Twitch Film broke the news on Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s next feature film, Livid, a dark fairy tale that turns on three young men who decide to rob an elderly woman’s house in the Irish heathlands. For those of you who enjoyed the massive amounts of gore that drenched the screen in Inside, don’t expect the blood to flow as the pic looks likely to pull back on the physical violence. What do you guys think about this? Are you still excited? You can read all about in beyond the break.
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Paris-based La Fabrique de Films will produce “Livid,” the next film from Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo (“Inside”). Marking the duo’s English-language debut, “Livid” is skedded for a September shoot in Ireland.
Headed by Verane Frediani and Franck Ribiere, La Fabrique has also taken Gallic distribution rights. Overlook Entertainment, Fabrique’s foreign sales agent, will handle international sales. Frediani and Ribiere will produce.
Billed as a “dark romantic fairy tale,” “Livid” turns on three young men who decide to rob an elderly woman’s house in the Irish heathlands.
Maury and Bustillo have completed the screenplay. “Inside” DP Laurent Bares will repeat as cinematographer.
Budgeted at $8.5 million, “Livid” continues Fabrique’s line in competitively priced, low-budget genre films. Pic also looks set to be structured as a France-Ireland co-production. “Livid” will be ready for delivery in spring 2010.
Cannes 2007 Critics’ Week player “Inside,” also produced by La Fabrique, proved one of this decade’s most notable genre debuts, selling to the Weinstein Co. for the U.S. and U.K. and to over 40 countries. Some auds found it stomach-churning, however. “Livid” looks likely to pull back on the physical violence.
At Cannes, Overlook will screen a promo reel of Frank Richards’ “The Pack.” The French-language ghoul tale toplines Emilie Duquenne (“Rosetta”), Benjamin Biolay (“Stella”) and this year’s Cesar winner actress Yolande Moreau (“Seraphine”).
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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