Movies
‘This Little Piggy’ Went to the Cannes Market: Warp Films’ Slate
Warp Films – who is responsible for both Kill List and Donkey Punch – has announced several new projects for this week’s Cannes market, a few of which slam right into our genre.
The first of several prominent book acquisitions is Rachel Ward‘s Numbers, a supernatural thriller “about a young woman who sees the dates of strangers’ deaths.” Paul Fraser will adapt.
Warp is working with is creative team Shynola, who will make sci-fi thriller Redmen, adapted from the novel “The Red Men” by Matthew de Abaitua. Stokes and Burke will also produce the debut feature of BAFTA short winner Paul Wright. “ ‘The Red Men’ is at heart a novel about a character wrestling with his conscience, set against a pervasive and Orwellian vision of contemporary society: surveillance, automation, biotechnology, and their implications for our humanity. ”
Lastly, Laura Hastings-Smith (who worked with Gutch on Steve McQueen’s Hunger) is pulling together the final financing for psychological horror This Little Piggy. “The thriller is about a young woman whose weekend camping with her new boyfriend and his daughter becomes a fight for survival. When her boyfriend goes missing, she and the child investigate the nearby farm and find themselves trapped like animals facing a terrifying death.”
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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