Universal pushes The Turning to 2020

Universal Pictures has announced that The Turning, the upcoming adaptation of the horror novella of a similar name by Henry James, will be hitting the big screen on January 24, 2020 after it was removed from its original February 22 release date in place of How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.

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Based on Henry James’s famous novella The Turn of the Screw (a source of several movie adaptations, including The Innocents), the story revolves around a young woman (Davis) who becomes the nanny of two orphans who live in a haunted country mansion. Wolfhard will play one of the orphans.

If this film sounds familiar, that’s because it was intended to be shot in 2017 on a $17 million dollar budget as Haunted under director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later, Intruders) for DreamWorks Pictures, and set to star Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones) and Alfre Woodard (Captain America: Civil War). Based on a script by Chad and Carey Hayes (The Conjuring), Haunted went through a page-one rewrite by Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum, Side Effects) that caused such seismic changes in the fabric of the story (altering characters, action, even the title) that it no longer resembled the project the studio signed on to make. In September of 2016, five weeks before shooting, producer Steven Spielberg personally pulled the plug on the project. Spielberg and other execs decided the best course of action was to fire Fresnadillo and Burns, going back to the original Hayes Brothers script and looking to start fresh development, despite $5 million having already been spent.

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This new version of Haunted, now titled The Turning, will be directed by Floria Sigismondi, who helmed 2010’s Joan Jett biopic The Runaways as well as episodes of Hemlock Grove, Daredevil and American Gods. Newcomer and Black List screenwriter Jade Bartlett penned the new draft based on the Hayes’ original script, with production going from February to April 2018 in Ireland. Scott Bernstein (Straight Outta Compton) and Roy Lee (IT) will produce