Reboots of both Van Helsing and Starship Troopers are in the works, but don't expect either to be remakes of the previous films. During recent interviews, producers from both projects talked about their take on the material.
Toby Jaffe is involved with the Total Recall reboot and spoke with Empire about making a grounded and accessible, but faithful adaptation of Starship Troopers:
"The more expensive a film is, the harder it is now to make it that violent... With Recall in particular, we made a conscious choice to keep it tonally closer to something like Minority Report. It gives the studio, and us as producers, the opportunity to reintroduce it in a new way...
...Verhoeven took [Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel] from one extreme and made it almost comical, whereas our job is to be a little more faithful to the book, and ground it a little more... Working in a visual-efects renaissance as we are, we have the ability to do so much more now. We can do the Jump Suits [armoured exoskeletons from Heinlein's novel], for example, which I don't think they could have done before."
A Van Helsing reboot is also planned, with Tom Cruise possibly starring in the film. Producer/screenwriter Alex Kurtzman also talked about taking a "grounded" approach to the material, inspired by the recent Christopher Nolan Batman movies:
"Well, I don’t want to give away too much, because we are actually at the very beginning of talking about what to do with it. But I do feel like the Van Helsing that Anthony Hopkins plays in [Bram Stoker’s] Dracula is sort of the parody version of it, and the Van Helsing that Hugh Jackman played was obviously in a different place as well. I think that these kinds of movies have evolved a lot since then. You know, The Dark Knight was a major, major corner-turning moment in the way that genre and superhero stories could be told. Really grounded in reality. Really grounded in really cool things. That’s what I’d like to do without sacrificing the fantasy element. We aspired to do that as well on Trek, you know, keep it “real.” That’s such a different franchise than Batman, but that’s really what we wanted to do. And we’d love to do that with Van Helsing."
Daily Dead's Official Podcast! Daily Dead's Official Podcast!
