At The Mountains Of Madness

As if this needs much introduction. Long before Guillermo del Toro made the mecha-versus-kaiju film Pacific Rim, he was lining up an adaptation of H P Lovecraft’s At The Mountains Of Madness – surely a match of material and filmmaker made in heaven.

Sadly, it came to nothing. With an escalating budget, and del Toro steadfast over the need for an R-rating to do the film justice, the plug was duly pulled on the project, and del Toro went off to make Pacific Rim instead. We live in hope that At The Mountains Of Madness can be financed somewhere and somehow, but with del Toro next lining up the ghost movie Crimson Peak, and the possibility of Justice League Dark or a myriad other projects after that, we suspect the wait here will be a long one.

Why we’d like to see it: HP Lovecraft’s ideas have been quietly plundered for years by writers and directors, so a direct adaptation of At The Mountains Of Madness will finally take us right back to the source. Modern special effects would give del Toro the chance to properly realise the ideas in Lovecraft’s text, which saw explorers in the Antarctic finding a pre-human city among the frozen wastes – and evidence that not all the inhabitants are dead.

Chances of it actually happening: Del Toro has said he’s willing to give At The Mountains Of Madness another go, so we await with crossed fingers. If any director’s capable of bringing Lovecraft’s classic weird tale to the screen, it’s del Toro, who has both the affection for the source novella and the skill to do it justice.

BioShock

It was only recently that we discovered just how close director Gore Verbinski came to directing a big-screen adaptation of Ken Levine’s remarkable videogame, BioShock. According to Verbinski, the film was well into production – to the point where physical sets had been built – before the studio pulled the plug on the project.