Early Monday morning, Guillermo del Toro revealed via a tweet thread a list of 17 movie scripts that he’s written that have gone un-produced.
2/2 SECRET PROJECT (UNTITLED), SUPERSTITIOUS, NIGHTMARE ALLEY, HAUNTED MANSION, THE HULK pilot, THE BURIED GIANT, THE COFFIN, DROOD, LIST OF 7 (Mark Frost) and a few others…
— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) November 26, 2018
Back when That Hashtag Show was first getting started, we got the chance to ask him about Justice League Dark at the Los Angeles Times Hero Complex Film Festival and he was extremely excited about it and the possibilities it presented, fast forward to 2015, Man of Steel had been out for a couple of years and despite a split audience, had done well enough to be a solid first film in DC’s cinematic universe and Batman v Superman was well into production. Unfortunately, it was not a priority at WB and del Toro needed to focus on his other projects and ended up stepping away.
What stood out to me here though was Pacific Rim 2 and his note that his script was very different from what we saw. Steven DeKnight is fantastic at responding to people on Twitter, so I asked him about the differences.
Not in detail. There were three different scripts developed by @RealGDT that I read. All amazing. All pretty different. Then there was the original script I developed that had Raleigh as the lead. Then a brother and a sister. Then finally Jake. https://t.co/V3YWFfKTOK
— Steven DeKnight (@stevendeknight) November 27, 2018
It’s a convoluted, often soul-crushing process.
— Steven DeKnight (@stevendeknight) November 27, 2018
We already knew that the script had gone through several iterations with del Toro’s script being replaced by a new script written by John Spaihts and then further rewrites by Derek Connolly. In DeKnight’s reply, while he doesn’t give any actual information about del Toro’s script, he does say that the 3 different version of it he had read were all amazing, he goes on to explain that in the script he developed, Raleigh would again be the lead, then another revision focused on a brother and sister, and the last revision, by Connolly, got us to where we were with Jake.
He adds that the whole process of going from script to screen is often a convoluted and soul-crushing experience. Going back to Guillermo del Toro’s tweets, you can tell how much effort goes into these projects and how much he really wanted to make each one. . . I would have LOVED to see his version of Wind in the Willows.
To be clear these screenplays are WRITTEN, done. Each of them took months or years of my life. Meetings, synopsis, beat sheets and were all written, features- 90-130 pages each.
— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) November 26, 2018
The next del Toro film you’ll be able to see in the theater is his adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, currently scheduled for release in October of 2019.