Quiet, Dracula, Scream: Weekly Round Up

16th March 2020

Okay people, so we’re all locked up in our quiet houses, ready to weather the storm, and likely looking to Netflix, Amazon and the various other streaming services out there for comfort. But what of the big releases? What’s going on out in the world of movies? Well, it seems that many of the big studios are still wary about releasing their tentpole films, so following MGM’s decision to shelve No Time To Die until the Corona scare has died down, we have news that some other studios are following suit.

A Quiet Place Part II, which was scheduled for release next Friday (March 20^th), has been pulled, and director John Krasinski released a statement about the decision on twitter. He also recently began talking up his plans for A Quiet Place Part III, so that’s interesting.

Disney, meanwhile, have been busy rejigging their schedule too. The long awaited The New Mutants is getting pushed back (again. At this point I’m not sure we’re ever going to be seeing that film), while Mulan has also been pulled from release, along with Scott Cooper’s upcoming horror Antlers (which remains one of my most anticipated films of the year).

Universal have also taken decisive action, and have delayed F9 (the ninth movie in the Fast and Furious franchise) back almost a year. The film was scheduled for release on the 22^nd of May this year, but will now instead be released in April of next year, which is, curiously enough, exactly when they were previously planning to release F10 (the tenth movie in the Fast and Furious franchise). Presumably that film, which is rumored to be the last of the main series, will instead be pushed back to 2022.

Peter Rabbit 2 has also been pushed back, although I’m not sure why. Nobody was planning to go see that anyway, were they? Were they!?

But enough of the real-world horror, let’s delve into the world of the horror genre, because we’ve got some interesting developments for the genre this week. And anyone who reads these regularly knows that when it comes to movies, horror is the only genre I care about.

We all know about the quiet disaster that was Universal’s Dark Universe, a shared Universe of the classic movie monsters that was supposed to begin with 2017’s The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise. But since that flop Universal seems to have been unsure how to handle what are arguably their most iconic properties. It turns out, however, that the best way to breath new life into these classic monsters might not be a shared universe at all. Who knew?

I knew. We all knew, actually. If only they’d come to us to begin with, eh?

Anyway, after the massive success of Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man (and if you’ve not seen it et you seriously need to. Although… don’t go to the cinema. Remain on lockdown, buy it on blu-ray when it comes out) Universal are reteaming with production house Blumhouse for a reboot of Dracula.

In the director’s chair is Destroy and The Invitation director Karyn Kusama, along with writers Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay.

There are lots of questions I have about this one. For example, how are they going to do it? Blumhouse’s filmmaker driven approach is certain interesting, and it worked wonders for The Invisible Man, but Dracula is a somewhat different beast. Will it be a period piece, or will we get a modern-day setting? And, of course, who will be playing the titular Count? Some of the most famous performances in cinema are actors playing Dracula (from Lugosi to Lee to… ahem… Neilson), so those are some big shoes to fill.

Still, The Invitation is fantastic, and so Kasuma’s involvement, along with the rest of her team, is a plus. Count me in.

Producer extraordinaire Jason Blum himself has been talking recently about his hopes for rebooting Frankenstein, but as of yet there are no plans.

While we’re talking horror reboots, one reboot people have been less keen on seeing is the one of Wes Craven’s 1996 meta-horror classic Scream. Arguably the definitive 90s teen slasher, Scream spawned its own franchise (and I actually quite like all the sequels, including the much maligned 3 and 4, which itself already sort of toyed with the reboot concept).

This week we learned that Radio Silence, the directorial team behind last years excellent and so desperately underseen hide and seek horror Ready Or Not, will be taking on directing duties of the reboot, and one of the team, Chad Villella, will be writing the script as well. So, it would seem we’re going to be getting this Scream update whether we’re… ready or not (thank you).

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