The movie that stumped James Cameron, Roland Emmerich, Paul Greengrass and Guillermo del Toro
Despite plenty of evidence stacking up to the contrary, not every widely-known high-concept classic is obligated to be given a big-budget remake utilising the latest in cutting-edge visual effects technology, with one proving so notorious that not even a slew of Hollywood‘s highest-profile directors could drag it out of development hell.
Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage was revolutionary in its own time, with the fantasy favourite’s imagination and inventiveness in realising its central premise yielding five Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Cinematography’, ‘Best Film Editing’, and ‘Best Sound Editing’, while it won the ‘Best Art Direction’ and ‘Best Visual Effects’ categories.
The story focuses on a Russian scientist who develops a method of shrinking humans down to microscopic size, but he develops a blood clot in his brain following an attack once the CIA mounts an extraction attempt. Putting his newfound technology to good use, a team of American agents in a nuclear submarine are shrunk down and injected into his body to try and remedy his ailment before time runs out, they expand to regular size, and everything becomes a soup of gooey matter.
It seems like the sort of crowd-pleasing lark that wouldn’t face too many struggles in making it to the screen with a fresh coat of paint, but the fact Fantastic Voyage still hasn’t been remade offers an indication of the difficulties, not even a top-tier array of talent could overcome.
James Cameron had harboured ambitions of directing since the 1990s, but once he became preoccupied with building the Avatar universe, he ruled himself out of the running. However, he planned to remain on board as its screenwriter and producer, but his planned replacement decreed his script as beyond awful.
“Jim called me up and said, ‘Roland, I want you to look at the script for Fantastic Voyage; it’s not there yet.’ And he sent it over, and I hated the script,” was Roland Emmerich’s assessment to Slash Film. “I said why have you put this in the future? I said let this happen now. It’s so much more cool and fun.”
The Independence Day scriptwriter drafted his own team, but then he, too, dropped out of the running. In 2010, Cameron was still attached to produce with Paul Greengrass in the director’s chair and a rewrite from Avatar scribe Shane Salerno, but the Bourne filmmaker became the latest name to vacate the project in favour of Shawn Levy.
After more than half a decade of radio silence, Guillermo del Toro was set for Fantastic Voyage alongside the still-producing Cameron, but by the summer of 2017, he’d placed it on the back burner in favour of developing The Shape of Water, which would eventually win him two Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’.
When del Toro was first announced, Fantastic Voyage was eying a 2018 shoot with eyes on a 2020 release, but instead, it vanished back into the ether. With Cameron, Emmerich, Greengrass, Levy, and del Toro having all tried and failed to mount the remake, it certainly looks as though it may be cursed to never happen at all.
