Guillermo Del Toro’s Greatest Unmade Movie Moving Forward?
After nearly two decades of trying, Guillermo del Toro thinks he might finally be able to adapt H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. In a recent interview, the Oscar-winning filmmaker reveals he’s taking one more stab at bringing the 1936 novella to life. The biggest difference between Del Toro’s previous attempts and this one is that now the filmmaker wants to adapt the novella into an animated film.
In a recent discussion with IndieWire, Guillermo del Toro said that after his experience making Pinocchio, he consulted with Oscar-winning VFX artist Phill Tippett (Jurassic Park) about the possibility of turning the novella into an animated film. “I said it would be ideal to do Mountains of Madness as stop-motion,” Del Toro recalled. “You watch the animation in a more rapturous way than live action.”
“It’s almost a hypnotic act, and the relationship to the story becomes more intimate in that way.”
Guillermo del Toro has deeper ties in the animated side of the film industry than many may know. IndieWire says the Pan’s Labyrinth director worked as a creative consultant from DreamWorks starting in the early aughts, with the stated goal of learning “every aspect of animation.” He worked on projects like Kung-Fu Panda and Puss in Boots.
Meanwhile At the Mountains of Madness is set more firmly in the wheelhouses for which Guillermo del Toro is best known. A sci-fi/horror novella originally published in 1936, the story follows a doomed expedition to Antarctica. Like most of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, the novella includes neither a happy ending nor a love story; both absences have done harm to Del Toro’s efforts to adapt the story.
Guillermo del Toro has been trying to get a studio to back his Mountains of Madness adaptation since at least 2006, when he was riding high off his Pan’s Labyrinth success. By the early 2010s he had James Cameron attached to produce and Tom Cruise ready to star, but Universal Studios had several problems with the project. For one they didn’t like that he refused to go for a PG-13 rating rather than R, and for another they didn’t like the similarities between its plot and that of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus.
In spite of more Guillermo del Toro successes piling up like Pacific Rim and The Shape of Water, he still failed to get a studio to back his Lovecraft adaptation.
Guillermo del Toro didn’t definitively say he had a green light for his animated adaptation, but considering the twin successes this year of Pinocchio and Cabinet of Curiosities, you would think that Netflix would be very eager for more work from the director. While the studio arm of the streamer may have tightened its purse strings due to its recent challenges, an animated feature would be a more attractive prospect when it comes to production budgets.
