Don Coscarelli regains Beastmaster rights, planning restoration and new film

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Back in the early '80s, PHANTASM mastermind Don Coscarelli collaborated with PHANTASM producer Paul Pepperman to write THE BEASTMASTER (watch it HERE), a film that paid tribute to the sword and sorcery films they had grown up on. Coscarelli directed the film, but he wasn't very satisfied with the finished product, feeling that his vision had been compromised by the demands of investors and producers. Neither the reviews nor the box office were great – but THE BEASTMASTER became a cult classic when it reached cable. This movie was shown so much on HBO and TBS, people joked that those initials stood for "Hey, Beastmaster's On" and "The Beastmaster Station". A generation of kids grew to love this movie that had disappointed Coscarelli.

It's not often that we hear BEASTMASTER-related news, but Coscarelli dropped a major announcement online yesterday, which happened to be the 38th anniversary of the film's release: he and Pepperman have gained the rights to THE BEASTMASTER, and are planning to revive the property with a restoration of the original film and the development of a remake or reboot.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, the pair said, 

PEPPERMAN: People have asked over and over and over [about a remake]. Every time some other movie gets remade — Conan, whatever — people start saying, ‘Hey, how come there’s not a new Beastmaster? How can that be?’ It’s like, ‘Uh, we don’t have the rights.’ Now, thank goodness, it’s coming to fruition.

COSCARELLI: We’re going to start taking it out and talking to companies and studios about doing a remake or a reboot of the original movie. A lot of latchkey kids watched that movie over and over again. Now they’re adults, and, with luck, some of them are running studios. So, we’ll see what happens."

So we'll have to wait and see if any studios are interested in making a new version of THE BEASTMASTER. In the meantime, the restoration plans have hit a snag because Coscarelli and Pepperman have discovered that the original negative has gone missing. They have started a website called WhereIsTheBeastmaster.com, through which they hope to find information that will lead them to the negative.

Coscarelli is asking fans who might find themselves around stored film to be on the lookout for the following:

It’s basically six film cans and then outside it would have The Beastmaster and it’s called ‘Original camera negative,’ ‘OCN'. We have all of this on the website and there’s a trail of where the negative went and where it went missing. There’s a chance it just went into a dumpster, never to be seen again. But there are a lot of rabid film collectors out there. A lot of times they gather up this stuff and it’s of uncertain lineage. A lot of them hang onto it because they don’t want to tell people they have it, or whatever. This would be an open license [to] be a hero to a generation of Beastmaster fans."

The original BEASTMASTER led to two sequels, 1991's BEASTMASTER 2: THROUGH THE PORTAL OF TIME and 1996's BEASTMASTER III: THE EYE OF BRAXUS, as well as a television series that ran from 1999 to 2002, for a total of sixty-six episodes. Coscarelli and Pepperman were not involved with those follow-ups.