Breck Eisner And McG Compete To Direct Ouija

While many directors have been linked to Ouija, the two directors now battling out for the job are Breck Eisner and McG. The project is expected to be set up with Platinum Dunes after both directors pitched their ideas to the company, with a decision expected to be made after the holidays.

Contrary to what you may think from the title of the film, Ouija will not be a horror film. Many horror fans will know that the Ouija board is used as a device in horror as a way for the protagonists to contact the supernatural, most famously in The Exorcist and more recently in Paranormal Activity. No, apparently Ouija will be an action-adventure film.

Tron: Legacy writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz have scribed the film, and the only details so far state that the film is:

a four-quadrant supernatural adventure centering around a family, with influences from The Mummy and Indiana Jones.

Eisner and McG have been favoured by the studio after several directors, such as Taken‘s Pierre Morel and The Omen‘s John Moore, fell out of the race. It’s now just a case of picking the one suitable for the job. Eisner directed Sahara which is very close in tone to the Indiana Jones style adventure described, but was a failure commercially. McG is certainly a more bankable director with successful blockbusters such as Terminator Salvation and Charlie’s Angels under his belt, and (supposedly) knows how to please the key cinema demographic of Males, 16 – 24.

For me it comes down to a lesser of two evils. McG is a terrible director, who substitutes loud noises for any sense of entertainment and/or plot. Ideally he fits in very well with director Michael Bay, and McG is very much like Bay’s less talented bastard child (and I hate Michael Bay).

Eisner is perhaps a riskier option but the film would arguably turn out better. Sahara was a turkey on all counts but his remake of The Crazies was better than we had any right to expect. It delivered solidly on atmosphere and was a fairly successful movie if completely lobotomising the socio-political message of Romero’s original.

The film also seems very unattractive even before the production stage. Having seen Tron: Legacy and been thoroughly underwhelmed and frankly bored by it, I hold no hope for the film’s script which will likely be as turgid and confusing as the Tron one was. It’s also being set up at Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes, a company responsible for trashing great, classic horror films by remaking them very badly. And the project is based entirely on a board game and sounds entirely derivative.

The film has a tentative release date of November 9th, 2012 and I’ll try to reserve most judgement on it until I’ve seen a trailer or the film itself (which is unlikely) but as for now it sounds pretty dire.