Some twenty years after allegedly being fired (by fax) from a film that he had developed for years, filmmaker Richard Stanley looks set to actually get to make The Island of Dr. Moreau.
All of the way back in 1996, Stanley was ejected from the set of the in-production movie, starring the likes of Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer, and replaced with John Frankenheimer. The fact that Stanley looks set to move forward with a new version, is looking to be partly because of David Gregory, who made the 2014 documentary Lost Soul. Stanley explained to Birth.Movies.Death:
“At this stage, I can’t say exactly by who, and how long it will take, but the project does live again, largely thanks to David. We’re currently scripting and designing the thing. It’s going to be an all-new screenplay and an all-new cast of beast-people; the original creatures are copyrighted by Warner Bros. [parent company of New Line, which produced and released the ’96 film]. I wasn’t particularly happy with them anyway.”
He went on: “The final designs of the creatures in the Frankenheimer version were disappointing, and I think there’s huge room for improvement. That’s something I’ve been talking about with the project’s backers at some length because that was also their concern, to reinvent the mousetrap in terms of the beast-people.”
“This time around, they seem to understand the film a bit better, and realize that the creatures are the stars of the movie, not the humans. That was the essential mistake made in the New Line version. They didn’t realize just how much mileage they could get out of those characters if they actually foregrounded them,” he added.
From what I understand, the new version looks set to be an event series, possibly for a streamer (?) as Stanley looks to be wanting that all-important R-rating.
The original 1996 movie was released in November of that year to pretty appalling reviews. Its troubled shoot was widely reported leading up to that release and its box-office taking suffered.
We’ll be interested to see what Stanley does with a new version. More as we get it.
