Shooting is gearing up to begin in British Columbia and Toronto for Universal Pictures’ The Thing, a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The Thing from Another World (1951). Strike Entertainment producing team Marc Abraham and Eric Newman chatted with the LA Times about the alien-horror pic and a bit about how having the chance to tell this tale was “irresistible”.
“I’d be the first to say no one should ever try to do ‘Jaws’ again and I certainly wouldn’t want to see anyone remake ‘The Exorcist,’ ” Newman tells the LA Times. “And we really felt the same way about ‘The Thing.’ It’s a great film. But once we realized there was a new story to tell, with the same characters and the same world, but from a very different point of view, we took it as a challenge. It’s the story about the guys who are just ghosts in Carpenter’s movie — they’re already dead. But having Universal give us a chance to tell their story was irresistible.”

Penned by Eric Heisserer, in a remote Antarctica outpost, an alien spaceship is discovered far beneath the ice. When a group of ambitious scientists decide to thaw out one of the creatures inside, they’re in for the terrifying fight of their lives…

“That’s the story we tell in this film,” says Marc Abraham, who is producing the movie with his Strike Entertainment partner Eric Newman. “We go back to that original Norwegian camp and try to figure out what happened. It’s like a crime scene, with an ax in the door, and the audience gets to be the detective, trying to piece together what horrible things have occurred.”

Being helmed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton are signed on to star.