Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton have been cast as the leads in Universal’s most recent version of The Thing. Winstead will play a scientists who journeys to an Antarctic research station after an alien space craft is discovered under the ice. Edgerton will play a helicopter pilot who teams with Winstead to stop the murderous alien who is freed from frozen captivity.
With director Matthijs Van Heijningen in charge, this will be the third time that John W. Campbell Jr.’s classic novella Who Goes There? has been filmed. The first was as 1951 The Thing From Another World. With credited direction by Christian Nyby, though it is probably that producer Howard Hawks had a strong hand in the process, the movie worked as a thriller and as an allegory for Cold War fears of communism. John Carpenter’s 1982 remake, with title shortened to just The Thing, may not have had any political parallels in its screenplay, but it certainly amped up the horror quotient, making it a classic in its own right.
Will a third time be a charm as well for this new version? Filming starts on March 15 in Toronto.
