Movies
News Bites: ‘Gone’ Release, More Details & Casting for ‘American Horror’, ‘Dont Be Afraid of’ These Posters
Summit Entertainment has picked February 24, 2012 as the release date of Heitor Dhalia’s thriller Gone, which stars Amanda Seyfried as “a young woman named Jill who returns home from her night shift to find her sister’s bed empty. She’s convinced the serial killer who kidnapped her two years before has come back to finish the job. But the police do not believe Jill, who knows time is running out. With no one to turn to, she sets off to find her sister and face her abductor once and for all.”
On the TV front, Evan Peters and Taissa Farmiga (both pictured here) are joining Connie Britton and Dylan McDermott in Ryan Murphy’s FX pilot “American Horror Story,” says THR. “The thriller centers on husband and wife Ben (“The Practice” ‘s McDermott) and Vivien Harmon (“Friday Night Lights” ‘ Britton) who move their family from Boston to a haunted San Francisco home in an attempt to rebuild their family after a miscarriage and affair.”
With even more details leaking, Farmiga will play Violet Harmon, the couple’s smart gothic daughter who befriends Tate Langdon (Peters), a handsome and charismatic teen described as a cult leader with movie star looks who isn’t what he seems. Living next door to the Harmons are Constance (Jessica Lange) and her daughter with down syndrome, who knows more about the house than everyone realizes. Denis O’Hare (“True Blood”) also co-stars as Larry the Burn Guy, a former resident of the creepy house.
Lastly, two new pieces of sales art (one from Bloody Disgusting, the other from Fangoria) have leaked for Troy Nixey’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, which arrives in theaters August 26 from FilmDistrict (Insidious). The pic follows “Sally (Bailee Madison), a young girl who moves to Rhode Island to live with her father (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend (Katie Holmes) in the 19th-century mansion they are restoring. Having stumbled upon the mansion’s hidden basement, Sally starts hearing voices calling out from the bolted ash pit, imploring her to open it. Sally obliges and unwittingly unleashes something so terrible, so unthinkable, that everyone’s life – hers most of all – is placed in immediate and grave danger.”
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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