The prequel to John Carpenter's stone-cold classic, The Thing continues to crawl undaunted - and, some might say, unbidden - towards our screens, and now it has two likely victims in the shape of Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton.
According to the Heat Vision Blog, Winstead, best known for Death Proof and set to be a geeky object of desire for more than just Michael Cera in **Scott Pilgrim Vs The World **later this year, has signed on to play a PhD candidate who travels with a Norwegian scientific team to Antarctica where an alien ship is found frozen in the ice.
Horrible deaths start to happen when the malevolent life form aboard the ship escapes, and Winstead’s scientist must join forces with tough guy helicopter pilot Edgerton to halt the chaos.
Edgerton hasn't got the breaks that some thought might have come his way after his brief turns in Attack Of The Clones and Revenge Of The Sith, where he played Owen Lars. But this could - could - see him bracketed with other Aussie leading men, like Sam Worthington, if it comes off. At the moment, we're just curious to see how similar the role is to Kurt Russell's MacReady, from the first film. We're guessing 'very' is the answer.
Matthijs Van Heijningen is the man orchestrating the chaos, working from a script by Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore and more recent writer Eric Heisserer.
Universal has booked space in Toronto for the film to start shooting next month. Can it compete with John Carpenter’s seminal 1982 take or Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World? We’ll find out next year…