Movies
Dimension Films’ Top Secret ‘Dark Skies’ Not So Secret
Dimension Films officially announced today – what we reported on April 4 – that they have acquired U.S. distribution rights to the supernatural thriller Dark Skies, written and directed by Scott Stewart (Priest, Legion).
As Bloody reported exclusively on April 4, Keri Russell (Mission: Impossible III, Grimm Love) and Daniel Barrett are both in talks to play a young boys parents, who are financially struggling to get by.
While they keep the story under wraps, we’ve already exclusively reported that the horror flick focuses on the parent’s 6-year-old boy who’s apparently been “marked” by an alien (living among us) for future abduction. It looks like it taps into some of the same themes of Fright Night, while also playing into child abuse (did the parents cause these marks on the child’s body?)
The film is scheduled to go into production this summer.
Jason Blum will produce through his Blumhouse Productions alongside Alliance Films who will fully finance the picture. Blumhouse is responsible for the Paranormal Activity films, and the forthcoming The Lords of Salem, directed by Rob Zombie, Sinister, Area 51, Vigilandia, Not Safe For Work and Mockingbird. Wowsa!
Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Alliance Films’ Charles Layton will executive produce. Alliance Films will distribute in Canada, in the UK (via its Momentum Pictures subsidiary) and in Spain (via Aurum). Octane, IM Global’s genre label, will launch international sales in Cannes.
“Jason has done a masterful job over the past several years of breaking new ground and creating huge commercial successes in the supernatural and horror genres,” said Bob Weinstein, co-chairman of The Weinstein Company. “We are confident that Dark Skies will continue that success.”
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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