Way back in September, David Cronenberg himself commented on another proposed remake of THE FLY (Cronenberg, in case you didn’t know, directed the first remake). While he’s not involved in any way, he basically said the idea was crap. That was then, but with news from Fangoria today shows that it might not have been as awful as Cronenberg (and the rest of us) thought.
In an interview with up-and-coming director Todd Lincoln (who’s been pegged to helm the HACK/SLASH adaptation), it was revealed that Lincoln had drafted a script with his writing partner Martin Schenk for the remake. The script wasn’t going to be a remake of the remake, if you’re wondering. Lincoln and Schenk leaned towards the ’58 original directed by Kurt Neumann as inspiration, rather than the masterpiece that was Cronenberg’s. Lincoln also went back and read the original George Langelaan short story that first appeared in Playboy before writing. The result, according to Lincoln, “was a complete outside-the-box re-imagining”.
Quite the daring move, eh? Lincoln elaborates, saying, “Our take had nothing to do with the Delambre family or Seth Brundle, and there are no telepods. This was a completely new story. The style and tone were a dark, smooth mixture of Val Lewton, Don Siegel and Roman Polanski. Someone still became a fly, but who, how, why they became a fly, what the creature looked like and what ultimately happened to it—we conjured totally new scenarios for all those major elements.” Not without heart, Lincoln and Schenk wrote in a role for David Hedison (the original’s leading man).
While this is all wonderful and great, there’s an unfortunate downside to all this. That’s right, Fox (in their legendary ‘wisdom’) decided that this radical departure was too much for them (and therefore us) to handle, and passed on it. “Last I heard, the people behind the people at the studio had changed their minds again and are leaning toward a straightforward remake,” Lincoln says. Yep, another one of those ‘coulda been’ scripts that will never see the light of day. Back to the paint-by-numbers remake we go.