The Walt Disney Company is preparing to reinvent one of their own titles. They’ve hired Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski and producer Sean Bailey to develop a new version on 1979’s The Black Hole. Travis Beacham will handle the script writing duties. Beacham doesn’t have a ton of experience, but he was one of the writers on Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans.
The original Black Hole featured many big names for the time including Maximilian Schell, Robert Forster, Joseph Bottoms, Yvette Mimieux, Anthony Perkins, Ernest Borgnine, and Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens in voice acting roles. It told the story of a space fleet that discovers a lost ship floating near a black hole (think Event Horizon, but with Disney!). On the ship, they find a scientist who has been missing for twenty years commanding a crew of faceless droids that turn out to be the former crew who tried to form a mutiny. They have received a procedure similar to what we know as a lobotomy in order to ensure their faithful service. The crew attempts to bring the missing team home, but the scientist has no plans to leave or let his servants leave as he plans to enter the black hole and explore where none have explored before.
This is clearly pretty dark sounding for Disney, but the original was naturally quite cheesy. However, as you might imagine, this sounds like it could be an entertaining movie using today’s methods and technologies.
The Black Hole was Disney’s first PG-rated movie and it cost $26 Million, which is pretty impressive for 1979. For example: Ridley Scott’s Alien only cost $11 Million to make in the same year. It will surely be interesting to see how big and bold they go thirty or so years later.
[Source: THR]
I had occasion to see part of “The Black Hole” not that long ago. Oh Cthulhu, such cheese! Female Spock psychic substitute: check! Cute Saturday morning TV show-type cute robot (voiced by Roddy McDowall): check! Comic relief western character cute robot (voiced by Slim Pickins): check! (Oh if he’d only said “what in the Wide World of Sports is-a goin’ on here??”) Robert Forester in his last major studio movie credit until Jackie Brown in 1997: check! Ernest Borgnine with his career going on life support (two years earlier — menacing redneck sheriff in Convoy with Kris Kristofferson and Sam Peckinpah, two years later — bumbling patrolman in Super Fuzz! with Terrence Hill): check! Yet another forgettable role from Anthony Perkins in the 1970’s: check!
And finally…
Blatant flaunting of the laws of physics in a decidedly metaphysical ending in which Maximillian Schell merges with a menacing robot inside a Black Hole and ends up in Hell: CHECK!
Was “The Black Hole” cheeseball fluff (with weirdly gay undertones)? Absolutely! Could it be done better? Most probably! But SHOULD it be?
While there have been good remakes in the past (and possibly a few in the present), most of them have been inferior in every way imaginable. I’m more than a little bit tired of hearing about a new, forthcoming “remake” or “reimagining” every other day, and Disney’s been one of the worst offenders, launching a line of straight-to-video sequels and made for TV remakes in the ’90s. Seriously, there’s GOT to be people with new ideas in Hollywood.
@Dr. Geek
If Slim Pickens said that, I’d go buy it right this moment.
You may pick on it now, but if you saw it when it hit new like I did you would have loved it, besides its no where nearly as cheesey as twilight.
Come to think of it Starwars is pretty cheesey looking back at it after all these years, but was and is still worshiped.
Only the same actors in time!!!