Despite a brief flaring of hope yesterday when it appeared producer Don Murphy had confirmed a June start date for Guillermo del Toro to start shooting At The Mountains of Madness, the reports have since been shot down and the project is still waiting to see whether Universal will flash the thumbs up. And now it would seem that Legendary Pictures is trying to take advantage of the continuing delay to tempt the director away to make its wreathed-in-secrecy monster movie Pacific Rim.
Let’s start from the beginning shall we? Though Mountains has James Cameron aboard as a producer and Tom Cruise at least interested in the lead, the expensive nature of the film and the push to keep it at an R-rated level in the US means Universal has been reticent to pull the trigger. Del Toro and his producers have already given an impressive presentation to studio types, but the worry that a pricey horror film would need to do Inception-level business is keeping executives’ feet chiller than they’d like.
And Legendary has been working on Pacific Rim – about which little is known besides Clash of the Titans writer Travis Beacham developing it under the radar – for a while now, with del Toro involved in the process for months. If Universal keeps him waiting much longer, there’s a solid chance he’ll stop climbing the Mountains for now and make Rim his next project (assuming one of the other 73,000 films he has in development doesn’t jump up as well).
So it’s back to those tenterhooks if you were waiting for GDT to finally start his descent into Madness – but the chance to see him bring big beasts to the screen might still happen. Just not in the way we expected…