Movies
Who Will Play Kuato (the Mutant Tummy Man) in ‘Total Recall’?
Bill Nighy (Underworld, Pirates of the Caribbean) is in negotiations to join the cast of Total Recall, Columbia’s Colin Farrell-led remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie, reports Heat Vision.
The movie, which starts shooting June in Toronto and will be directed by Len Wiseman, also stars Bryan Cranston as the villain, and Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel as the female leads. Ethan Hawke is on board for a cameo.
The movie is ditches the Martian storyline from the original pic and instead involves nation states Euromerica and New Shanghai, with Douglas Quaid (Farrell), a factory worker in the latter who begins to believe he is a spy — although he doesn’t know for which side.
Nighy will play Quatto, the leader of the resistance. (In the 1990 movie, the character, called Kuato, was played by Marshall Bell with the conceit that the leader was actually a small mutant living off the human.) The question is: will he once again be a mutant?
Dinner for two?
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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