Fantastic Voyage is up for a reboot, and may or may not hit the big screen one of these days.
The original Fantastic Voyage, where a group of people are shrunk down so they can travel a man’s bloodstream and save his life, is still a great sci-fi classic, although it was obviously inevitable the film would be remade one day with CG and tons of other new things.
Shawn Levy, who most recently helmed Real Steel, is slated to oversee the new Fantastic Voyage if it ever gets made, and he’s also the director of the Pink Panther remake with Steve Martin, and the Night at the Museum films.
As it turns out, Levy is also slated to direct an update of Frankenstein, which is written by Max Landis, who also penned the new superhero hit Chronicle.
As Levy acknowledged to Collider, there’s another Frankenstein flick with Aaron Eckhart shooting right now, I, Frankenstein, but Landis’s Frankenstein “is a great script. Everyone now knows, because people have seen Chronicle, that Max Landis is a hell of a goddamn writer and his script for Frankenstein is awesome. I, Frankenstein is a wildly different movie, but in the culture it’s another Frankenstein movie… So if anything, that movie has kind of raised the bar for the studio and I to cast the living hell out of our Frankenstein.”
The big key for Levy is the casting of Igor and the doctor. “What’s the juicy pairing that makes [the budget],” which could be in the $70-80 million range, “a good net? That makes that financial bet smart and worth it? If that’s the budget, we’ve gotta make sure we cast it really, really right.”
Levy also told Collider Fantastic Voyage is still going through script work, and he said with him and James Cameron, who’s producing, they both want to take the scientists out of the boat.
“Let’s be tactile and hands-on,” Levy said. “Part of the reason why the budget for my Fantastic Voyage is not small is that we’re talking about free dives in the body with the real full-scale underwater sets, so it’s not just looking at the sh*t, maybe it’s climbing up the f*cking spine. It’s real, full-scale underwater 3D practical sets.”
