It’s too bad Phil Hartman isn’t around anymore to make fun of this on The Simpsons, it’s almost something Troy McClure would star in, you could even call it Lincoln Vs. Lincoln.
Oh wait, Troy did star in The Revenge of Abe Lincoln, but the joke I’m trying to make is 20th Century Fox will be releasing two Lincoln films this year: Steven Spielberg’s biopic of Honest Abe starring Daniel Day Lewis, and Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.
Spielberg’s Lincoln is being co-financed by Fox and Dreamworks, meaning, Fox will launch it overseas, while DreamWorks will release it domestically.
Of course, Fox is also putting out Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, in 3D, which opens this June.
The basic plot? President Lincoln’s mother is murdered by a supernatural creature, which drives him to kill vampires along with their slave-owning helpers. Abe kills his first ‘vamp at the age of 12, when he lures the vampire responsible for his mother’s death to the family farm and skewers it with a homemade stake.
The Lincoln Vampire movie is based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, which was given the following positive review by the Los Angeles Times: “[Any] writer who can transform the greatest figure from 19th century American history into the star of an original vampire tale with humor, heart and bite is a rare find indeed.”
Spielberg’s more somber take on Lincoln doesn’t have a current release date, but Collider reports it will come out in the fourth quarter of the year after the election. So how will the two movies affect each other? Well, its doubtful they’ll cancel each other out, and there’s plenty of Lincoln to go around for everyone, no matter your personal genre preference is.
Personally, I’m especially looking forward to seeing Lewis, arguably our greatest living actor, playing Lincoln for Spielberg, and Vampire Hunter is obviously much less serious and weighty. (It’s probably worth noting that Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the Vampire Hunter novel, is also the screenwriter of Tim Burton’s upcoming big screen version of Dark Shadows).
It’s funny because this reminds me of when back in 1998 when there were two asteroid movies back to back with Armageddon and Deep Impact, and when there were also four Alexander the Great movies in development. Only Oliver Stone’s got made, of course. Now through some funny serendipity, Abraham Lincoln’s back as Oscar bait, and major geek genre fun.
