Movies
OMFG of the Day: Magnet Releasing Gets Epic, Announces 26-Chapter Anthology ‘The ABCs of Death’
Drafthouse Films, Timpson Films and Magnet Releasing are teaming to produce The ABCs of Death, an absolutely epic 26-chapter anthology feature that aims to showcase death in all its vicious wonder and brutal beauty.
Production is scheduled to begin this June, with completion slated for Jan. 2012, six months, six weeks and six days later. 25 established directors from all over the world are participating, while the 26th helmer will be chosen as part of a worldwide competition to find a new filmmaking talent. Each director will be assigned a letter from the alphabet that represents a word to act as a springboard for a short story about death. It will be up to each filmmaker to interpret the letter and word they are assigned to tell a deathly tale, from the accidental murder to those committed in cold blood. The sum of these parts, from A-to-Z, will comprise “The ABCs of Death.”
The current list of confirmed participating directors includes Jason Eisener (Hobo With A Shotgun), Nacho Vigalando (TimeCrimes), Ti West (The House of the Devil), Srdjan Spasojevic (A Serbian Film), Angela Bettis (Roman) and Ben Wheatley (The Kill List), as well as Banjong Pisanthanakun (Shutter, Alone), Adrian Garcia Bogliano (Cold Sweat), Ernesto Diaz Espinoza (Kiltro), Bruno Forzani (Amer) and Héléne Cattet (Amer), Gadi Harel (Deadgirl), Thomas Malling (Norwegian Ninja), Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police), Simon Rumley (Red White and Blue), Tak Sakaguchi (Mutant Girls Squad) and Yuji Shimomura (Death Trance), Marcel Sarmiento (Deadgirl), Timo Tjahjanto (Macabre), Andrew Traucki (Black Water), Jake West (Evil Aliens) and Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die, You’re Next!).
“Helming Fantastic Fest for the past seven years has brought us in touch with an amazing community of filmmaking talent,” said League. “The ABCs of Death offers us a chance to work closely with a large number of visionary filmmakers to create a film with more jaw-dropping moments than a whole summer of blockbusters.”
“This project was inspired by my young sons being introduced to the world through their ABCs books. The idea of subverting that format to reveal a study in all the dastardly and humorous ways a person can leave this world appealed on multiple levels,” said Timpson, who added that “it was somewhat fitting to learn that the earliest forms of the ABCs books actually did use fear of punishment to teach the young.”
“I got to the letter A and said yes,” said Magnet SVP Tom Quinn, who negotiated the deal with League, Timpson and Jason Janego. “We’re super excited to be working with a familiar cast of Magnet directors, as well as Tim League and Ant Timpson.”
Now in its second week of release, the Radio Silence-directed Abigail is the third Universal Monsters vampire movie released in the last year, coming along in the wake of period piece The Last Voyage of the Demeter and horror-comedy Renfield. All three films have struggled at the box office, but Abigail at least has some good news to celebrate this week.
Renfield came along first in April 2023, ending its run with $26.4 million, while Last Voyage of the Demeter ended its own run with a mere $21.7 million. The vampire ballerina movie Abigail has already outgrossed both films, hitting $28.5 million at the worldwide box office this week.
The bad news is that Abigail‘s reported production budget was $28 million, so it seems unlikely to make a profit at the box office when you factor in the marketing spend and everything else on top of that figure. And that’s especially a bummer because Abigail is such a crowd-pleasing good time, with most horror fans agreeing that it’s one of this year’s best movies thus far.
The Universal Monsters brand has been struggling in the wake of Leigh Whannell’s hit The Invisible Man back in 2020, with these smaller spinoff movies failing to make their mark at the box office. Maybe it was never a good idea to release three low-key Dracula movies within the span of a single year, or maybe audiences just aren’t into vampires in general right now.
Whatever the case may be, Universal was smart to re-team with Whannell for a reimagining of the Wolf Man, which is howling its way into theaters in 2025. There’s a good chance that movie will blow the box office totals of Demeter, Renfield and Abigail out of the water, especially since it’s been a while since a Hollywood werewolf movie roared its way onto the big screen.
In the meantime, we expect Abigail will be coming home soon. Stay tuned for a date.
In Abigail, “After a group of would-be criminals kidnap the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure, all they have to do to collect a $50 million ransom is watch the girl overnight. In an isolated mansion, the captors start to dwindle, one by one, and they discover, to their mounting horror, that they’re locked inside with no normal little girl.”
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