Movies
Cannes Sales Art for ‘Kidnapped’ Director’s ‘Welcome To Harmony’
It was announced back in February that Cell 211 co-producers Vaca Films are set to make a big sci-fi horror project provisionally titled Welcome To Harmony, to be directed by Miguel Angel Vivas. The main reason for excitement is that Vivas directed the awesome Spanish-language Kidnapped, an intense and violent home invasion movie soon to be released by IFC Films.
Based on Juan De Dios Garduño’s best-selling novel “Y Pese A Todo…,” the film will be about a World War III, pitting the US, Great Britain and Israel against Iran, China and Russia. Welcome To Harmony will focus on chemical weapons that wipe out everyone in each country, except a father and daughter and their hated neighbor living in Bangor, Maine who have to confront unwanted visitors.
Even cooler, Vivas is currently writing the script for the project alongside Alberto Marini, former director of international productions at Filmax, who helped develop key titles at the studio including the [Rec] films, The Way and Sleep Tight.
Financing is being locked down, but we scored a look at some art being used at Cannes.
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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