It was announced in September that Tom Hardy will scale Mount Everest for a movie about British explorer George Mallory, allegedly the first man to scale the world’s highest peak while shirtless, then punch it square in the face. And much as Mallory’s feat set off years of attempts to best him, already there is a competing Mount Everest picture in the works from Universal—studio motto: “Because it’s there, and people have heard of it”—this time about the failed 1996 expedition that was already covered in the best-selling Jon Krakuer book and subsequent TV movie Into Thin Air, but which could now justify its rehashing by starring Hardy's Dark Knight Rises nemesis Christian Bale.
Directed by Baltasar Kormakur—whose Icelandic fishing disaster film The Deep first cemented his apparent, odd zeal for movies in which a group of men freeze to death—is preparing for yet another difficult, extremely cold shoot with the simply titled Everest, one for which the notoriously method Christian Bale is no doubt already preparing by sitting on bags of frozen peas, as he’s gotten kind of soft lately. It’s unclear as of yet which project will be the first to fake-scale Mount Everest; what is clear is that this is still the best Mount Everest movie ever made.