Last year, commercial director Carl Rinsch became the latest in a long line of directors stretching back to the ’80s to attempt a remake of Universal Studio’s classic Creature From The Black Lagoon. He replaced Breck Eisner on the project, who walked away from the project after spending nearly four years trying to get it in front of cameras.
Eisner recently talked to Shock Till You Drop and spoke candidly on the factors that killed his version – “It suffered from the realities of development hell and a writers strike.”
Understandably disappointed after putting so much work in to the project, Eisner was enthusiastic about what his version of the film could have been. “It would have been risky and amazing,” he stated. “The design of the Creature by Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery was awesome. True to the original, yet obviously updated for today’s technology. The journey on the Rita, the boat design, it was ready to go.”
Eisner got as far as scouting South American jungles for location shooting. “Scouting Peru, Brazil, Columbia. We went into the jungle of mirrors. It was an amazing experience. I didn’t come out of it empty-handed but I didn’t come out with a movie, which is what I would have wanted.”
And though the project now has a new director, Eisner is skeptical of The Creature From The Black Lagoon‘s chances of ever reaching cinemas. That isn’t a slam against Rinsch, though. Eisnerplaces the blame on two things – The amount of money spent on development over the years and the poor critical and box office reception for another Universal Studios monster remake, The Wolfman, earlier this year.
Between [the Wolfman failing] and spending a lot of money in development, it’s money against the movie. When a movie is that close to happening, it takes a long time for people to forget about spending that money and to be re-engaged in it. I’d love for somebody to make that movie. It won’t be me.
As a first time feature director, Rinsch has a difficult task ahead of him in finally getting Creature to the screen. Rinsch is also hard at work for Warner Brothers on their similarly long-in-development redo of Logan’s Run. He’s ambitious, I’ll give him that. Let’s see if that ambition can actually get either of these two projects on the screen.
