Movies
‘Godzilla’ Script Gets Rewrite, Casting To Begin Soon
With buzz of the project rising, Legendary has brought in Iron Man 3 and Sherlock Holmes 3 scribe Drew Pearce to do a rewrite on Godzilla before it gets the casting process under way, reports Variety.
Godzilla has gained a lot of momentum after Legendary previewed a short test reel of the pic at the San Diego Comic-Con this past July, and sources tell the site that Pearce is now being brought in to do a four-week polish on the script.
Monsters director Gareth Edwards is still helming the pic, with Roy Lee, Dan Lin, Jon Jashni, Thomas Tull and Brian Rogers producing.
Previous drafts were penned by David Callahan, who wrote the original draft, as well as David Goyer and Max Borenstein. Sources add that the polish isn’t being done because Legendary has any major problems with the script; it wants to age up the characters so that they fit the prototype of the actors they would like to target.
Making his first appearance in 1954 (Gojira) Godzilla is a giant monster that lives in the sea that comes from the ocean to feed on mankind.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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