John Carpenter, James Wan, Guillermo del Toro, and the classic 1954 horror movie that’s impossible to remake
You can see the irony in John Carpenter becoming one of the most remade directors in Hollywood, but when he tried to play the industry at its own game and slap a fresh coat of paint on a horror classic, he couldn’t crack it, but at least he wasn’t alone.
Halloween, The Fog, The Thing, and Assault on Precinct 13 have all been given a do-over, Christine was supposed to get one, and Escape from New York is still trying to get one up and running, while Dwayne Johnson’s interest has mercifully cooled on his proposed Big Trouble in Little China redux.
Of course, one of Carpenter’s best movies was a remake, with The Thing showing that he had form for taking an existing title and putting his own stamp on it. However, when he hired Bill Phillips to pen a screenplay for The Creature from the Black Lagoon in the early 1990s, it couldn’t escape development hell.
“John went to the trouble of having some glass plates made of the lagoon he envisioned, and he hired a master effects man to make a model of the Creature,” Phillips recalled. “Universal never did make the movie. I’m not sure why that one never got made.” It stumped him, and it stumped Carpenter, but they were far from the last filmmakers to try and fail.
Several years later, Ghostbusters‘ Ivan Reitman was attached, but that didn’t make it out of the starting blocks, either. When Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy showed that audiences weren’t against the idea of Universal’s classic stable of monsters being revived for the modern era, the studio tried again.
In 2001, Pleasantville‘s Gary Ross teamed up with his father, Arthur A Ross, who’d co-written the 1954 original, but that fell apart, too. The next year, Guillermo del Toro entered the chat, but like so many of the projects that he’s attached himself to over the years, his Creature from the Black Lagoon quietly disappeared into the ether.
The big positive from his involvement was that he reworked his pitch into The Shape of Water, which won him Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, so there was a mighty shiny silver lining at the end of it. Still, nobody seemed to get the memo that the film was proving impossible to remake.
Breck Eisner, who helmed the financially disastrous Sahara and the not-bad remake of George A Romero’s The Crazies, was the next to throw his hat into the ring. Carl Rinsch, who directed Keanu Reeves’ horrendous 47 Ronin and, most recently, made headlines for spending $55 million of Netflix’s money and being convicted of money laundering and wire fraud as a result, was also briefly attached in 2009.
James Wan is currently holding the baton, with his Creature from the Black Lagoon announced in the summer of 2024. We’re now two years removed, and it hasn’t moved any further forward. Looking at the long and completely unsuccessful history of the remake so far, it’s best not to hold your breath.
