A remake of The Creature From The Black Lagoon has been on the cards since I was a proto-Outposter. For years, the roster of directors who took a run at it and were defeated just grew and grew.
John Landis, John Carpenter, Ivan Reitman, Guillermo del Toro, Breck Eisner, and Carl Erik Rinsch all tried and failed. Well, Universal’s monsters are back in fashion after the Dark Universe fell on its ass.
In 1995 Peter Jackson rejected the chance to direct to work on King Kong, instead. Eventually, he delayed that project to work on The Lord Of The Rings.
From the cleverly budgeted and successful recent movie remakes to the multi-million-dollar investment in a whole new themed land at a Universal theme park, they are a big draw all over again.
So this remake is backing up the agenda again, and it has a new writer on board. Mayans M.C. co-executive producer Sean Tretta will take up the pen for Atomic Monster and Universal Pictures. He will base his script on a treatment from James Wan, Rafael Jordan, and Bryan Coyne.
Wan is in early talks to potentially direct The Creature From The Black Lagoon. It is described as a grounded and modernized retelling, both a “visceral” horror and one that pays tribute.
Julie Adams and Richard Carlson starred in the original 1954 chiller, telling the story of a scientific expedition to the Amazon that encounters a piscine amphibious humanoid. The underwater sequences were ahead of their time.
The story was actually based on a real myth of a race of half-fish, half-human creatures in the Amazon River.
Universal had been pursuing Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans as the leads for the remake, but there will be no movement on casting for a while.