Drew Goddard's feature directorial debut THE CABIN IN THE WOODS may have been my pick as "The Most Overrated Horror Film of the Last 20 Years", but while I really do not like that movie, I'm still impressed when I look over Goddard's résumé. He has packed a hell of a career into the last fifteen years, working on Buffy, Angel, Alias, Lost, developing Marvel's Daredevil for Netflix. He wrote CLOVERFIELD and THE MARTIAN, and came in to help rework the last act of WORLD WAR Z. Right now he's helping get the script for DEADPOOL 2 into shape. That's a career to envy, in my opinion.
Goddard is now setting up his second feature directorial effort at Fox. The studio has acquired his spec script BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE, and he is attached to produce and direct the film.
Goddard's history with J.J. Abrams is very apparent in the secretive way in which this spec sale happened. The script didn't go through the normal reading process, it was only sent directly to the top studio executives. The script was on a tablet handed to the executives by a courier, who would take the tablet back when they were finished reading.
It's no surprise then, that plot details are being kept entirely under wraps. All that has been said about BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE is that it
is a contained thriller with either sci-fi or horror elements.
We're going to have to wait to find out what's causing these bad times, and what sort of place the El Royale is. The top search result for "El Royale" on Google is a historic apartment complex in Los Angeles. That sounds like a fine setting for a film, but we can't know for sure at this point if that El Royale is the one Goddard has written about.
It does look cool…