Director Guillermo del Toro has tried a couple of times to bring H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness to the big screen but was foiled by unknowable powers from beyond the cosmos (studio executives). Now, del Toro’s relationship with Netflix could revive the project once more.
Speaking on Fangoria’s Stephen King podcast the Kingcast, del Toro was asked whether his new partnership with Netflix could open the door for another try at bringing the eldritch horror story to life.
“Take a wild guess which were the first projects I presented [to Netflix], you know? I went through the cupboards and found [The Count of] Monte Cristo, [At the] Mountains of Madness. Those were a couple of the ones I presented first,” del Toro says.
While del Toro didn’t reveal the response to his presentation, he said that the project would change considerably from when he first tried to develop At the Mountains of Madness as a movie, saying the script he co-wrote 15 years ago “is not the screenplay I would do now, so I need to do a rewrite.”
“Not only to scale it down somehow but back then I was trying to bridge the scale of it with elements that made it somewhat be able to go through the studio machinery. You know?” del Toro explained.
The director says without the need to go more “blockbuster-y” he is free to make “a far more esoteric, weirder, smaller version of it.” del Toro adds that he can restore scenes that were left out and do away with big set pieces he has “no appetite for.”
“Like, I’ve already done this or that giant set piece. I feel like going into a weirder direction… I know the ending we have is one of the most intriguing weird, unsettling endings, for me.”
H.P. Lovecraft’s horror classic is something of a white whale for director Guillermo del Toro. del Toro and Matthew Robbins wrote a screenplay back in 2006 and it was announced in 2010 to be nearing production with Tom Cruise as the star. But hesitancy over the R-rating and similarities to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus scuttled del Toro’s plans.
Whether or not Netflix will rescue del Toro’s project or not remains to be seen. In the meantime, he has assembled a talented group of collaborators for a new Netflix horror anthology called Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Also coming to Netflix is del Toro’s stop-motion adaptation of Pinocchio. Furthermore, his next movie, Nightmare Alley, premieres this week in theaters.
Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.