First goddamn week of winter! It was recently announced that the prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing was being moved by Universal from its April release date to make way for Fast Five, the next installment in The Fast and the Furious series.
No new date was given for The Thing.
It turns out that The Thing is having some additional filming to enhance the feeling of dread that was so prevalent in Carpenter’s film.
HitFix spoke to producer Marc Abraham about the new round of filming.
Everything he said confirmed what we’d already heard, that the filmmakers have a cut of the movie and that they are now hoping to use this next round of photography to enhance existing sequences or to make crystal clear a few story beats or to add punctuation marks to the film’s feeling of dread.
t’s important to remember that on the John Carpenter version of “The Thing,” there was a year of post-production necessary to create the iconic monster sequences, and in many cases, they had no idea how they were going to accomplish any of that while they were shooting the film. Rob Bottin’s work was an act of faith up till the moment it actually started cutting into the film, and there was nothing easy about the magic that Carpenter captured in that film.
Abraham spoke about how confident he was in the work by Matthijs van Hijningen Jr., the film’s director, and how proud he is of his cast, including Joel Edgerton and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. He knows how important both the monster moments and the connective character material are to the film working, and they’re looking at everything right now to make sure they’ve got what they need.
One moment he mentioned specifically is the first major encounter with the Thing in this film, and I’m sure that’s something you scrutinize carefully. It sets the tone for everything after, and you have to sell to the audience right there that the Thing is real, that it’s got a physical presence, and that it’s a menace. If they want to tweak that moment until they feel like they’ve got the exact right version, that sounds like time and money well-spent.
Overall, though, this doesn’t sound like the additional work motivated the date change, but rather the date change giving them room now to do whatever they’d like to do to get the film finished just right.
It does sound like they want the film to be perfect. Do you feel this is anything to be worried about?
All I know is that I am human. I just wanna get up to my shack and get drunk…
