H.P. Lovecraft fans can now lose all hope of seeing Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness in the near future, today Legendary Pictures confirmed in a press release that del Toro will now direct Pacific Rim looking towards a 2013 release date and a September start date. Also in an interview with Deadline, he talked about why At the Mountains of Madness fell apart and if that could continue.
Statement from del Toro:
We started developing PAC RIM a while ago with the mad passion and enthusiasm of a project unwatched and unchecked by politics or comparisons. We designed and shepherded the movie we want to make. We start shooting in September and we hit the ground running because we are so in sync. My partnership with Legendary represents, both in scale and creative demands, a huge step forward for me.
Why At the Mountains of Madness fell through:
You may think I’m being glib, but I don’t know. Since the day of the decision, I haven’t had a face to face with them. We’ve exchanged a few phone calls. I my mind, we were given the parameters of a budget and screenplay, and I was given the chance by the studio to create a visual presentation… And we hit the target on the budget they gave us, not a figure I arrived at. This came after months and months of story boarding, haggling with VFX companies, and bringing down the budget number. The week before the decision, I was scouting in the border of Canada and Alaska. We were a week away from opening offices in Toronto. We were crewed up, and frankly, I am as puzzled as most people are.
The possibility of moving it to another studio and having Tom Cruise attached:
We were gauging interest and there was interest, very serious interest, but nothing that could happen before Universal names the terms in which they would allow us to try and set it up somewhere else. That is my hope right now that they just allow us to seek a home for this…. I spoke to Tom, who has been incredibly supportive and who said, ‘Let’s keep going, let’s make this movie down the road.’ He’s definitely that interested and that happy where we were creatively. So we have good legs to travel on, if the time and the opportunity present itself.
So Pacific Rim is next and if Fox (who were mentioned in the interview) want to take on the huge R-rated epic, it would be a fantastic thing to see a project Guillermo del Toro wants to see on the screen.