Being a filmmaker can sometimes be a bit like being a medieval parent. The smart thing to do is to have as many children as possible, because the growing-up process is so fraught with danger that not all of them are going to make it to adulthood. It’s why, when directors get some heat, you’ll often find them developing or becoming attached to more projects than they could ever make, in part because they’re overflowing with ideas, and in part just in the hope that one gets through the system the next time they have a free slot. And few directors in recent years have had as much heat as Guillermo del Toro.
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The Mexican filmmaker is one of our favorites, with his utterly distinct take on horror, fantasy, Gothic romance and sci-fi, turning out movies that no one else could have made, whether they’re big-budget tentpoles or intimate Spanish-language films. He’s reasonably prolific — nine films in a little more than 20 years is a better track record than many have — but he, more than most, has been attached to a huge number of projects over the years, only a percentage of which have made it to screens.
This week, the Criterion Collection edition of “Pan’s Labyrinth,” the masterpiece that cemented del Toro’s position on the A-list, hits this week, and we thought we’d use the occasion to mark (as we did with David Fincher and with Stanley Kubrick) some of the heartbreaks, near-misses, ones that got away, and still-bubbling projects he’s been linked with, developing or has turned down over the years, in a handy A-Z format. Take a look below, and let us know which ones you hope end up becoming realities in the comments — we think you’ll agree that almost every one sound like they’d be terrific movies.
A is for “At The Mountains Of Madness,” “Alma” and Anthology
Maybe del Toro’s biggest and best-known nearly-happened project was “At The Mountains Of Madness,” his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal tale of terror about an Antarctic expedition that leads to the discovery of a hidden city created by an ancient race of creatures called the Elder Things. The project has been in development in some form since the 1990s, but came closest back in 2010 at Universal, when Tom Cruise was attached to star. The film had James Cameron on board as producer, and was as far as scouting locations when the studio got cold feet, pulling back on the R-rating that the director said he needed. A compromise couldn’t be found, though del Toro has said that he’s more open to a lower rating now, and still hoped to make it at Legendary as recently as 2014, though last year he compared the traumatic experience, in del Toro-ish fashion, to having “a horrible miscarriage and there are a lot of scars and you’re still dangling a piece of placenta.”
In other A-related projects, 2010 also saw the director attached to produce a project called “Alma,” based on an animated short from Pixar animator Rodrigo Blaas. The eerie tale, about dolls who lure children to be one of them, was set for feature adaptation at Dreamworks Animation with Blaas again directing, but little’s been heard of it since (though the two are still working together — see the entry for T). The same year also saw del Toro hinting at Comic Con that he was developing a horror anthology series for cable, but it’s never resurfaced, possibly because “American Horror Story” stole its thunder.
B is for “Beauty And The Beast” and “The Bloody Benders”
Next year will see Emma Watson star in Disney’s live-action remake of ‘Beauty And The Beast,” but interestingly, the “Harry Potter” star nearly played the same role in a very different take on the project from del Toro. Set up at Warner Bros., the film, scripted by “Bridget Jones’ Diary” writer Andrew Davies, got close to being his next project after “Pacific Rim,” but “Crimson Peak” ended up overtaking it, and del Toro departed the film in June 2014. The studio intended to make his script with another director, but Watson jumping ship to the Disney movie has likely killed the project for now.
A far darker tale would have been “The Bloody Benders,” a horror script from writer Adam Robitel about the Bender family, who ran a hotel on the Kansas prairie in the 1870s, and killed as many as 20 of their guests. Del Toro was set to produce the movie in 2012 with “Natural Born Killers” producer Don Murphy and “Real Steel” exec Susan Montford, but as of yet there’s been no public forward movement on it.
C is for “Champions”
Remember back in the mid-to-late ’00s, when Tom Cruise and producing partner Paula Wagner were briefly in charge of United Artists? One of the major projects they were developing was “Champions,” del Toro’s re-do of a short-lived British TV series from the 1960s about secret agents given superpowers by an advanced civilization after a plane crash. It was an intriguing idea — del Toro’s take on the superhero genre — but when Cruise and Wagner exited the studio, the project seemed to die, though it established a relationship with the A-lister that saw him flirt with roles in “At The Mountains Of Madness” and “Pacific Rim.”
D is for “Drood,” “Deadman” and “Doctor Strange”
One of the more atypical projects, in some respects, that del Toro has been linked to was “Drood,” an adaptation of Dan Simmons’ novel about Charles Dickens and the eerie story behind his unfinished final work “The Mystery Of Edwin Drood.” The project was set up as part of his deal with Universal in 2009, but hasn’t yet moved forward. D is also for a couple of superheroes, the first being DC’s “Deadman,” a tightrope walker who is resurrected after his murder with the ability to inhabit live bodies. Rumors were that del Toro was attached to produce a movie version for director Nikolaj Arcel (now making “The Dark Tower”) — it never materialized, but the character was meant to be part of the line-up of “Justice League Dark” (see below).
The other is an earlier incarnation of a character who reaches the screen imminently: Marvel’s “Doctor Strange.” The Sorcerer Supreme arrives in theaters in a few weeks as part of the MCU, with Benedict Cumberbatch starring, but the great Neil Gaiman revealed last year that he and del Toro had pitched a take on the character to Marvel back in 2007, just when the studio was beginning to put the pieces of their cinematic universe together. Unfortunately, Gaiman said, “At the time, Strange was way down their list and we let it go. I remember Guillermo had one particularly brilliant idea for a way to do Strange.”
E is for (Saturn And The) End Of Days
Next year’s “The Shape Of Water” marks something of a return to lower-budget fare for del Toro, but he’s had other projects of a similar scope brewing for a while, the most prominent of which might be “Saturn And The End Of Days,” a film that would have closed out a trilogy about “childhood and horror” begun with “The Devil’s Backbone” and “Pan’s Labyrinth.” The director first touted the project at New York Comic Con in 2008, saying “It’s like what would happen if the Apocalypse was viewed by you [while] doing errands. You go back and forth and nothing big happens except the entire world is being sucked into a vortex of fire.” He’s always cautioned that the project would take a long time to happen, and told us in 2013 that he’d got as far as page 25 of the script, so this may be a while off yet.
F is for “Frankenstein” and “Fantastic Voyage”
The idea of Guillermo del Toro doing a version of “Frankenstein” is so obvious it’s surprising it hasn’t happened yet, though not for lack of trying. The director’s been actively attached to a new version since 2007, at one point suggesting that he was inspired by Frank Darabont’s original screenplay for Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 adaptation, which by most accounts was botched in translation. He shot some test footage with regular collaborator Doug Jones as the monster back in 2009, and firmly started work on the script in 2012, the next year saying that he wanted Benedict Cumberbatch (who starred in a stage production directed by Danny Boyle) to lead the film. He’s always cautioned that the project would take a long time to come to fruition, but with Universal building their Monster universe at the moment and casting Javier Bardem in the role without any mention of del Toro, we have to assume that the director’s take is done for now, at least at that studio.
One of the new projects on his slate in its place is “Fantastic Voyage,” a remake of the ’60s sci-fi classic about a ship shrunk in order to travel inside the human body. A James Cameron-produced remake’s been brewing for years, with Shawn Levy, Louis Leterrier and Paul Greengrass among the directors attached, but del Toro came on board to direct the film in January.