Caffeinated Clint
A TV series based on the darn f*ckin freaky ’90s flick “Event Horizon” – man, my spine will never forgive me for summoning such chills up it during the film’s last half – is in the works over at Amazon.
Paramount, who produced the film, has inked a deal with the streamer to adapt the 1997 movie for the small screen. Needless to say, the stars of the flick – Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne, Joely Richardson and Kathleen Quinlan – won’t be returning for the do-over, and neither will original helmer Paul W.S Anderson – if only because the original production would’ve caused him quite the headache (the studio had him rush the flick, subsequently not giving him enough time to do a polish on it in the editing room, with the reviews at the time nothing to fax mom and pop at home about).
Paramount and Amazon have buddied up on quite a few projects of late, most of which are small-screen takes on some of the former’s movies – for instance, the “Jack Ryan” series, being an adaptation of the Tom Clancy-created character that appeared in five films, and the upcoming “Jack Reacher” and “Galaxy Quest” adaptations.
The new “Event Horizon” will be spearheaded by “Blair Witch” helmer Adam Wingard, who serves as director and executive producer. Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin, who produced the film, will executive produce with Wingard and Jeremy Platt.
The film, a dud at the box-office (grossing $26.7 million on a $60 million production budget) but now considered somewhat of a cult fave, featured a Philip Eisner-penned story of a crew of astronauts sent on a rescue mission after a missing spaceship, the Event Horizon, spontaneously appears in orbit around Neptune. Searching the ship for signs of life, the rescue crew learns that the Event Horizon was a test bed for an experimental engine that opened a rift in the space time continuum and left our universe entirely, allowing a hostile entity to possess the ship. The original 130-minute cut of the film was heavily edited by demand of the studio, much to the chagrin of Anderson – who was coming off “Mortal Kombat” at the time.
After a successful initial DVD release, the studio and Anderson became interested in assembling a director’s cut but they quickly found out that the excised footage had not been carefully stored and that much of it had gone missing. The deleted scenes were stored in a salt mine in Transylvania and had rotted away due to how they were stored in the mine. The plan to assemble a director’s cut was abandoned and instead a special-edition two-DVD set was released that featured one deleted scene, two extended scenes, and a few shots of deleted material in the included making-of. The footage is of “video” quality.
Had Anderson’s film not garnered such popularity over the years, and made a good profit on VHS and DVD, Paramount wouldn’t have likely even had considered adaptation it for television – so here’s t the troubled film that could getting some overdue remuneration.
