Actors Stephen Boyd (1931 – 1977) as Charles Grant and Raquel Welch as Cora Peterson in the sci-fi … More
David S. Goyer is hoping he and Guillermo del Toro can still find a way to embark on their long-gestating remake of the 1966 sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage.
Goyer, of course, collaborated with director Christopher Nolan as a screenwriter on The Dark Knight Trilogy and is currently executive producing Apple TV+’s Murderbot. Goyer first teamed with del Toro in 2002 on the Wesley Snipes Marvel movie Blade II, which he co-wrote and del Toro directed.
Starring Raquel Welch, Stephen Boyd, Edmund O’Brien and Donald Pleasence, Fantastic Voyage follows a crew of five scientists who are miniaturized in a submarine and injected into the bloodstream of an ailing colleague in a desperate bid to prevent his death. The Fantastic Voyage remake was to be directed by del Toro from a script by Goyer and produced in collaboration with James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment.
“Guillermo’s a good friend. We’ve worked on about five or six projects together,” Goyer said in a recent Zoom conversation. “We were in prep on Fantastic Voyage and it was very close. A production designer was on and all of the above.
“While we were in prep for that, Guillermo said, ‘I’ve got this deal with Searchlight’ and ‘Do you have any scripts that could be made for $20 million?’ and I gave him a script called Antlers that we produced together,” Goyer added.
Wesley Snipes, director Guillermo del Toro, & David S. Goyer (Photo by M. Caulfield/WireImage)
While Antlers — a horror thriller directed by Scott Cooper that starred Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons — was released in 2021, Fantastic Voyage remained in development. The film was put on pause in 2017, Deadline reported.
“Fantastic Voyage got derailed with the-then regime at Fox, but God, it was a good one,” Goyer added. “It was such a great experience working with Guillermo and James Cameron on that, and then my experience working on that led to my working on Terminator: Dark Fate with Cameron and we got along great.”
While it has been eight years since Fantastic Voyage began treading water, Goyer said he isn’t giving up hope on the film just yet.
“I’ve known Guillermo forever. I hope one day we can figure out [how to get Fantastic Four made],” Goyer said. “In fact, now, my friend Steve Asbell is running [20th Century Studios], so it occurs to me that I should call him up and say, ‘Hey, maybe we should try to resurrect this.’
“I also have a Star Wars script I wrote with Guillermo that hasn’t been made, so there are definitely a few ones that have gotten away,” Goyer added.
David S. Goyer Also Collaborated With Guillermo Del Toro On His Netflix Horror Anthology
While David S. Goyer has yet to complete Fantastic Voyage with Guillermo del Toro, the duo has had the good fortune to collaborate on other projects including the 2022 Netflix horror anthology series Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
When the series — which was initially known as Guillermo del Toro’s 10 After Midnight (via Deadline) — got the green light at Netflix, the director reached out to Goyer to write a script for one of the eight short stories he was going to produce for the series.
“He said I’m doing this 10 After Midnight thing at Netflix and I’ve optioned X amount of short stories and I had read them all,” Goyer recalled. “Guillermo said, ‘You get first pick if you want to do one. Since I had always loved The Autopsy and the author [Michael Shea], I wrote that.”
Then, Goyer, added, he experienced something that’s never happened to him in all of his years as a writer.
“I adapted the story and sent Guillermo the script and he said, ‘I love it. No notes.’ It went into Netflix, and no notes,” Goyer enthused. “It was the first time in my life that it ever happened. It was just like, ‘Boom!’ It was just a completely painless experience.”
Goyer is currently executive producing the new Apple TV+ sci-fi action comedy Murderbot, which is based on Martha Wells’ best-selling The Murderbot Diaries book series.
In addition, Season 3 of Goyer’s sci-fi series Foundation debuts on Apple TV+ on July 11, while his Netflix fantasy series The Sandman returns for its second and final film season with six episodes on July 3 and six episodes on July 24. Meanwhile, del Toro is readying his version of the Mary Shelley horror classic, Frankenstein, for release on Netflix sometime in November.
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