Per Cinescape.com: “Universal Pictures has set actor Benicio Del Toro to star in the remake of THE WOLF MAN. The story will be set in Victorian England. Del Toro will play a man who returns from America to his ancestral homeland, gets bitten by a werewolf and begins a hairy moonlight existence. Andrew Kevin Walker is writing the script. Scott Stuber, Rick Yorn, Mary Parent and Benicio Del Toro will produce. The plan is to shoot the film in 2007 for a summer 2008 release.”
This could work, but not if it’s Stephen Sommers-ized. I mean, The Mummy actually wasn’t bad, because the character and setting lent itself to a modern, outsized take. However, The Wolf Man is an intimate story, and actually should be done for a fairly small amount of money. I just don’t know if Hollywood can even think that way any more.
I foresee horrible CGI effects and the inevitable huge explosions and whipping camera work, any of which would doom the project.
One promising note is that the attached screenwriter, Andrew Kevin Walker, did work on the screenplay of Tim Burton’s superlative period horror piece Sleepy Hollow (which is really one of my favorite films of the last ten years). Still, Burton’s projects are always Burton’s, and I don’t know how much of a stamp Walker had on that film. However, he also wrote Se7en, so we know he can do horror.
On the other hand…”Walker spent several months working on some frightening new twists to a familiar tale, adding several characters and plot points that take advantage of cutting-edge visual effects technology.” Uh, oh. And the sheer fact that this is being lauded elsewhere as a possible “summer tentpole” indicates that elephantitis will be the order of the day.
Meanwhile, Del Toro is an even odder choice to play an Englishman (even one who’s mostly been raised in America), but otherwise I think he could make a pretty impressive Larry Talbot. Indeed, Del Toro himself has at times referenced his childhood love of the Universal classics, as in this autobiographical sketch: “From my childhood in Puerto Rico I remember that I loved basketball and monster movies: movies of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and The Creature From The Black Lagoon. Reptiles and dinosaurs fascinated me.”
Meanwhile, the Victorian England setting is reassuring, assuming they don’t screw things up.
Which they will.
