Back in September of 2019, we reported that The Collected – the third film in the franchise that began with 2009's The Collector (watch it HERE) and continued with 2012's The Collection (watch that HERE) – had started filming in Atlanta. Genre legend Tom Atkins had a role in the film, and he told us that the first thing shot on The Collected was the twelve-page sequence that makes up the ending.
A year and a half later, that's still all that has been shot for The Collected. During a conversation on the The Thing with Two Heads podcast, writer/director Marcus Dunstan and co-writer Patrick Melton revealed that production had been shut down on The Collected after just eight days of filming – and this was months before the pandemic shutdowns, so that wasn't the reason. Although Atkins expected to be back on set by the end of October 2019 and there were rumblings that filming might resume at the start of this year, The Collected is still dormant.
Dunstan said (with thanks to Movieweb for the transcript),
Well, we shot for eight days, and then it was shut down. I invested in this thing, I'd like to know what's happening. We stopped hearing from anybody with the production. I know most of the props I brought there have been stolen. I would think that anybody else who invested in this movie that thinks that it's happening, wouldn't they like to know what's happening? … All calls and emails have gone unanswered … When you can't get anyone on the phone and you don't hear anything, at this point, I'm really p*ssed off."
Melton added,
There's no plans to start shooting it. We haven't talked to anyone who was in the production… we'd love to finish it, but, I don't know. We're not the producers, so we don't know."
Dunstan continued,
It was all avoidable, completely avoidable, that's what drives me nuts. I didn't invest ten years getting this opportunity, facilitating it, getting it together, pre-writing three different versions of this thing, just to be ignored. That wasn't my goal. And I'm assuming that people who invested capital in this thing are probably wondering, 'Hey, where's our movie?'"
Sadly, the producer Dunstan and Melton can't get in contact with owns the rights to The Collected, so if they can't start talking to each other and work this situation out, the movie will never be completed. Here's hoping there will be some positive progress on this very soon.
Atkins was joined in the cast of The Collected by Josh Stewart, Randy Havens, Dot-Marie Jones, Navi Rawat, and Emma Fitzpatrick.
The full The Thing with Two Heads podcast with Dunstan and Melton is embedded below:
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