On second thought, Guillermo Del Toro would make a PG-13 version of At The Mountains Of Madness

As maybe the biggest monster lovers of their respective eras, Guillermo del Toro and H.P. Lovecraft are definitely Drift compatible. But like any Jaeger-style mind meld, the bonding of their brains—one living, the other long dead—could result in a lot of expensive mayhem. Three years ago, Universal pulled the plug on del Toro’s proposed adaptation of Lovecraft’s 1931 novella At The Mountains Of Madness—in part, it would seem, because the Pan’s Labyrinth director outright refused to deliver anything less than an R-rated version of this undoubtedly pricey project. So adamant was he about keeping the carnage that he even dismissed the idea of taking Madness to another studio, lest that studio grant him both the freedom to make the MPAA uncomfortable and the money to bring enormous, godlike beasts to convincing life. Tall order, that.

But as he revealed recently in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, del Toro may be softening a little on his hardline, R-or-bust policy—perhaps because, as he learned working on Pacific Rim, you can still fuck stuff up real good with a PG-13 rating. “I think I could do it PG-13 now,” said the director, presumably through gritted teeth. “So I’m going to explore it with [Legendary], to be as horrifying as I can, but to not be quite as graphic.” Legendary, which bankrolled Pacific Rim and its 2017 sequel that we all have China to thank for, certainly appears to be in the business of paying del Toro to unleash enormous monsters on receptive Eastern markets. So maybe the filmmaker will finally get his passion project off the ground, albeit with fewer human autopsies that he initially intended. Should the project fall through again, however, there’s a certain 1986 video game he could translate to the screen instead.