Last year was quite a frustrating time for veteran Hollywood directors Ron Howard and Guillermo Del Toro.
They both had projects set up at Universal, The Dark Tower and At the Mountains of Madness, and both fell apart at the last minute. It’s incredibly frustrating, but many times in Hollywood a project can fall apart at the last minute for a variety of reasons, usually over the budgets.
Del Toro of course was also going to direct The Hobbit, but At the Mountains of Madness was his dream project for many years, and he was devastated when it fell through.
The director told Deadline he thought the movie was happening until he got the call on what he called “Black Friday” to tell him it wasn’t.
“The one that really hurt most was Mountains, because it was really abrupt. We were scouting, on the border of Alaska, in the glaciers in a helicopter. And I get the call, you gotta come back for a meeting on Friday.”
Still, you know Del Toro’s not going to give up this easy, even after the latest setbacks.
As he told Empire, “I think we may still make it. When I’m brave enough to go see Prometheus, I’ll know. But for now, I don’t know. I go to the theater, I buy my ticket for Prometheus and I go see something else, because I’m afraid. I am emotional, because the ideas are similar… I’ll see it next week, I promise!”
Del Toro is indeed hoping Prometheus would serve as a good example that an R-rated horror film can be a hit, but if it was an even bigger hit, perhaps the film could have made that argument much more convincing.
Still, you hope one day the studios will come around to making a truly epic, big budget, big scale horror movie. I mean, how many Fast and Furious movies can you shoot already? Wait, don’t answer that one.
