We live in an age of paranoid anxiety, where nobody can be totally sure whether or not a random person on the street is carrying the coronavirus or is a secret Trump supporter or whatever, and we’ve all been spending a lot of time isolated with the same people for months. That basically makes it the perfect time for Hollywood to take another crack at The Thing—a horror franchise of sorts that was last thawed out for 2011's The Thing, which was a reboot/prequel/remake of 1982's The Thing, which was a reboot/remake of The Thing From Another World, which was an adaptation of the 1938 novella Who Goes There?, all of which are about a shapeshifting alien thing (give or take that first movie) that terrorizes an arctic research station.
The latest news of another potential Thing comes from a blood test that Variety conducted with John Carpenter (who made the ‘82 version), who turned into a horrible tentacled monster with mouths where there shouldn’t be mouths when he was brought near an open flame. Actually, Variety just asked him if he was planning to work with Jason Blum and the horror people at his Blumhouse studio again (they’re behind the new sequels to Carpenter’s Halloween), which prompted Carpenter to reveal that he thinks Blum is “going to be working on The Thing, rebooting The Thing” and that Carpenter himself is “involved with that, maybe.” It’s the perfect kind of non-answer you’d expect from the thing from The Thing, and while it’s barely any information at all, it does more or less line up with a rumor we heard back in January about Universal and Blumhouse working on a new version of The Thing.
The twist that time around, though, was that the movie would be a direct adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.’s Frozen Hell, the full-length novel that his Who Goes There? was originally pulled from, and not a remake/sequel/whatever to any of the previous Thing movies. Nobody mentioned Carpenter being involved back in January, and an adaptation of Frozen Hell technically wouldn’t be related to his movie at all, so it remains to be seen if that’s what’s happening here.