THE BLACK HOLE Remake May Be Too Dark For Disney
The team behind Tron: Legacy — director Joseph Kosinski and producer Sean Bailey — have been working on a remake of the classic 1979 sci-fi film The Black Hole since 2009. At some point during the development, screenwriter Jon Spaihts (Prometheus, Doctor Strange) was hired to write the script and it's something he seems very excited about and happy with.
Thanks to an interview Spaihts gave to /Film, we have an update on the current status of the film project and apparently the reason nothing has happened with it yet is because it's too dark for Disney. He explains:
Black Hole was an amazing experience. That was one of those movies I was stuck on until I cracked the beginning, and suddenly it just started to flow. I loved that script. It sits uneasily in Disney’s world as a dark epic, and Disney is in a very colorful place. They already have multiple big space epics going, so I don’t know how or whether it’ll find its way to light of day, but I sure wrote a heck of a movie and was thrilled to do it. It was very faithful to the original but clever in all the ways in that first film was silly, I hope.
The original 1979 film followed a group of space explorers aboard the USS Palomino who come across a lost ship, the USS Cygnus, hovering outside a black hole. Inside the Cygnus, the explorers meet a scientist commanding an army of faceless robots, who explains his crew deserted him as he planned to go through the black hole. The explorers soon discover that the robots are the remnants of the former crew and that the scientist has no intention of letting them leave.
It's be a shame if Disney passed on this project. I was actually kind of looking forward to seeing what Kosinski would do with it. It's OK to make dark films! On top of that, I don't know how it can't be any darker than what they are doing with the Marvel and Star Wars properties. Hopefully they eventually move forward with it!
