Movies
Beatles Remix ‘Paul is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion’ Gets New Home
Ater being announced last year, Los Angeles-based entertainment venture Sham Productions has acquired the film rights to author Alan Goldsher’s acclaimed Beatles/zombie remix novel, Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion. Sham President Barry M. Greenberg will produce Goldsher’s screen adaptation, with Goldsher attached as co-producer.
Published to rave reviews in June of 2010 by Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster, “Paul Is Undead” follows “the story of the zombified Fab Four, from their early days shuffling through the foul sewers of Liverpool, to the infamous Shea Stadium riot that almost destroyed New York, to the breakup that turned Abbey Road Studios into rubble.”
More inside.
Of his screenplay, Goldsher says, “It’s loyal to the book’s oral history vibe. The film will be done mocumentary-style; I envision a big budget Behind The Music. You’ve got Mick Jagger as a zombie hunter, you’ve got Ringo Starr as a Ninja, and you’ve got John Lennon eating all the brains you can shake a guitar at, so I figure some lucky director will have a blast with this.”
Greenberg notes, “We’re thrilled to have “Paul Is Undead” as one of our first properties. Alan’s screenplay is original, hilarious, and, above all, really gross. Folks will be talking about the Sgt. Pepper bloodbath for years.”
The brainchild of veteran producer Barry M. Greenberg, Sham Production’s goal is threefold: To entertain, to tell stories, and to get stuff made. Sham’s productions, be they for film, television, or the Interweb, will be intelligent and accessible. And Sham intends to partner with the coolest of the cool, be it a writer, an actor, a director, or a fellow production company.
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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