At the Mountains of Madness: Guillermo del Toro hasn’t given up on the project

Although Guillermo del Toro’s pure enthusiasm for movies is hard to deny, he’s also got plenty of projects on the shelf that he simply hasn’t been able to make. One of those passion projects was an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, and it came very close to getting made a decade ago. But at the end of the day, the studio wasn’t about to drop an estimated $150 million on an R-rated horror film, even if it was going to star Tom Cruise.

While speaking on The Kingcast, Guillermo del Toro said that he still hasn’t given up on At the Mountains of Madness, but if he is able to resurrect the project, he’d need to rewrite the script. In addition to toning down the scale of the story, he would want to bring back much of the weirdness the studio wanted him to remove.

The thing with Mountains is, the screenplay I co-wrote fifteen years ago is not the screenplay I would do now, so I need to do a rewrite. Not only to scale it down somehow, but because back then I was trying to bridge the scale of it with elements that would make it go through the studio machinery. I don’t think I need to reconcile that anymore. I can go to a far more esoteric, weirder, smaller version of it. You know, where I can go back to some of the scenes that were left out.

Guillermo del Toro continued, “Some of the big set pieces I designed, for example, I have no appetite for. Like, I’ve already done this or that giant set piece. I feel like going into a weirder direction. I know a few things will stay. I know the ending we have is one the most intriguing, weird, unsettling endings, for me. There’s about four horror set pieces that I love in the original script. So, you know, it would be my hope. I certainly get a phone call every six months from Don Murphy going ‘Are we doing this or what? Are you doing this next or what?’ and I say ‘I have to take the time to rewrite it.’” I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed.

Now that Guillermo del Toro has a relationship with Netflix (with his stop-motion Pinocchio musical and Cabinet of Curiosities anthology series set up there), it would be the logical place to pitch At the Mountains of Madness; after all, Netflix is famous for handing over massive amounts of cash with little creative meddling. Guillermo del Toro’s next film, Nightmare Alley, will be released on December 17th.