It's looking like Guillermo del Toro is moving from his second go at people in big machines to people inside of small machines inside of people. With Pacific Rim 2 less and less likely to get secure backing and produced within this decade, del Toro is apparently in early talks to take the reigns of the long-gestating Fantastic Voyage remake, which has a script and treatment from David S. Goyer, del Toro's collaborator on the excellent Blade 2. The remake would finally team del Toro with fellow visionary James Cameron, who has been set as a producer on this project for some time now and was a would-be backer for del Toro's passion project, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's haunting At the Mountains of Madness.

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Image via Universal

Fantastic Voyage has been kicking around for awhile as a remake-ready property, and del Toro is exactly the kind of stylish filmmaker that could not only give the effects a good redesign but also improve on the vaguely entertaining original. The 1966 original, which sent a team of scientist inside the body of a sickened VIP via a microscopic spaceship, is more of a technical marvel than a genuinely gripping science fiction tale, with the sole exception of Donald Pleasance's exceptionally nefarious performance. del Toro might very well develop the tensions inside the small spacecraft to a far more substantial state, and his unparalleled sense of scale could make the shots from inside the body truly astonishing. At the very least, it should be as fun and giddy as Joe Dante's underrated Innerspace, which had its own celebrity producer in Steven Spielberg.


Mind you, several directors have been attached to Fantastic Voyage over the years, from Shawn Levy to Paul Greengrass to Louis Leterrier, and del Toro hasn't confirmed anything as of yet. That being said, with the sequel to del Toro's similarly underrated robot vs. monsters blast on a very serious hold, Fantastic Voyage would make for a strong candidate for del Toro to follow-up his bloody, gorgeous Crimson Peak, and another chance for del Toro to helm a major league science fiction property.

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