Warner Bros. and Andy Muschietti have a nice working relationship going where he makes movies for them and those movies rake in the dough. Muschietti directed the Stephen King movie IT on a budget of $55 million and the movie earned over $700 million at the box office, so it makes sense that he and Warner Bros. plan to continue their collaboration with IT: CHAPTER 2, which is sure to make a lot of money as well, the manga adaptation ATTACK ON TITAN, and now a new adaptation of the 1895 H.G. Wells novella THE TIME MACHINE.
Andy Muschietti has written a treatment for this re-imagining of THE TIME MACHINE with his sister Barbara Muschietti, who will be producing the film with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson of Appian Way. Arnold Leibovit will serve as executive producer, and he was also executive producer on the 2002 version of THE TIME MACHINE that was directed by Simon Wells (the great-grandson of H.G. Wells) and starred Guy Pearce.
The Wells novella told the story of
an inventor who hopes to alter the events of the past and travels 800,000 years into the future, where he finds humankind divided into warring races.
The most interesting thing about this project will be seeing how Muschietti handles the Morlocks, villainous creatures that live underground and cause a lot of trouble for the time traveler in the future. Young kids who saw director George Pal's version of THE TIME MACHINE in 1960 were terrified by the Morlocks in that film (pictured above), and I'm hoping Muschietti will do something creepy with them, too.
Warner Bros. will be working with Paramount Pictures to bring THE TIME MACHINE to the screen.