Two high profile genre films that had men named Neil attached to work on them have gotten trapped in development hell, and the chances of them escaping into production don't look very good at the moment.
First up is the remake of writer/director Andre Øvredal's 2011 breakthrough film TROLLHUNTER. Chris Columbus's 1492 Pictures had the U.S. remake rights to the Norwegian creature feature, and they had hired a director I'm always rooting for, Neil Marshall. Unfortunately, Marshall's schedule may have been the reason that the new take on TROLLHUNTER hasn't been made, and apparently won't be getting made.
During a recent conversation with Birth.Movies.Death, Øvredal gave this update on the project:
I never communicated with anybody about it, but I read online that Neil Marshall was attached to direct it, and I was like, 'OK, I can get behind that,' and then suddenly it didn't happen. I believe that just after signing up for Trollhunter, Neil got too busy with Game of Thrones, and that's what stopped it; that seems to be the case, anyway, and then it just kind of died.
…(The remake) is not going anymore. We [Øvredal and the Norwegian producers] got the rights back, and I don’t think they will be pursuing another remake."
Another project that appears to be dying is the live action feature adaptation of the 2013 zombie video game THE LAST OF US, which was set up at Sony with the game's creative director Neil Druckmann writing the script and Sam Raimi attached to produce through his company Ghost House Pictures. IGN reports that Raimi shared some bad news about THE LAST OF US at a recent press lunch.
Well, unfortunately that one — when we went to Neil with Ghost House Pictures we were hoping to get the rights like we do any project and then we'd take it out and sell it but we'd control the rights. With this one he went to Sony — who I have a very good relationship with — but they have their own plans for it and I think Neil's plan for it — I'm not trying to be political — Neil's plan for it is not the same as Sony's. And because my company doesn't have the rights, I actually can't help him too much. Even though I'm one of the producers on it the way he set it up, he sold his rights to Sony, Sony hired me as a producer by chance, and I can't get the rights free for him so I'm not in the driver's seat and I can't tell you what Sony and Neil together will decide on. If they do move forward I'd love to help them again.
…Right now it's just sitting there. They don't want to move forward, and it's not my place to say why, and Neil, I think, is in a slight disagreement with them about how things should go so there's a standstill. And I don't have the power to move it."
I don't really have strong feelings about these two projects either way – I've never played THE LAST OF US, and still haven't gotten around to watching Øvredal's TROLLHUNTER, so I can't say how much an adaptation or a remake of these properties would have appealed to me. However, if there are fans out there who are wanting to see them, I hope something happens to get them to start moving forward again.