Movies
“The Walking Dead” Movie Will Happen…Eventually
Who knew Robert Kirkman’s comic would become such a pop culture phenomenon when AMC took a huge chance and adapted the material, which had been passed on more than a handful of times.
Now in its ridiculous seventh season, with the eight already announced for 2017, the zombie series shows no signs of slowing down. The ratings have never been better – averaging near 12 million people a week – and Kirkman’s comic has set the stage for at least 11 seasons.
Scott Gimple, showrunner of “The Walking Dead”, believes as much will be the case for the hit AMC series, as he revealed when ComicBook.com asked whether or not the TV show could become a movie. He even jokes about what a modern day cast would look like:
“That question comes up every now and again,” Gimple said. “I’m sure one way or another, one day, it’ll happen. I think it would be cool.”
“William Shatner as Rick. We’ll get Edward James Olmos as Daryl. Hit all the big shows!” Gimple joked about a potential reboot on the big screen. “Matthew Fox as the Governor!”
Recent shows have been turned into movies and found huge success (i.e. Sex and the City, The Entourage), but would it make sense to wait until the series concludes to tackle such a feat? I love the idea of a movie creating an arc that fits right in the middle of a show’s high point, like what Paramount did with “South Park” and the accompanying R-rated film in 1999. Here we are 17 years later and that show is still going strong. AMC could do this with “The Walking Dead” and its massive fan base (12 million viewers could translate into a $100 million box office) at any point and it would work. The question is, would it be worth their time and money, would it signal an end to the show, could it kill the show? You know the old say, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.
Still, those hoping to see Rick and company on the big screen should be beaming with optimism. It’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of when.
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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