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Del Toro was incredibly close to shooting an adaptation of At The Mountains of Madness in 2011, when Universal shut the project down. They decided they weren’t going to risk a $150m budget on an R rated for film which would probably need about $500m to break even.
A couple of years ago Del Toro shared a thirty second clip of pre-viz by Industrial Light and Magic. Another film to add to list of what couldn’t been.
To be fair: from a financial perspective that sounds like the right call, even if the movie would have been interesting.
R rated horror movies just don’t bring in the amount of money to sustain high budgets like that. The exception being “It” (and the sequel), but that had more mainstream appeal and also only came out years later.
Although isn’t the break even number usually closer to double the budget?
With regard to breaking even, I was just recalling what I found on a small article about the film. So who knows what it would really need to break even? Double sounds more realistic though.
The Thing On The Doorstep
There was a (very) loose adaptation of The Thing on The Doorstep in 2023 - Suitable Flesh.
However it felt less like an adaptation of Lovecraft and more like an adaptation of Brian Yuzna/Stuart Gordon doing Lovecraft. Which isn’t a bad thing - love Reanimator.
I saw that in the cinema but was underwhelmed.
The intrinsic problem is the classic Lovecraft story is: scholar discoveries some terrible, ancient evil and goes mad or runs away. Thus doesn’t lend itself to a big movie adaptation and the most successful Lovecraftian films have worn their inspiration lightly. I’d have loved to see what GdT did with MoM but I don’t quite know how you could jazz it up for the general movie-going audience.
