The long-gestating sci-fi remake of Fantastic Voyage, which could pair James Cameron with Guillermo del Toro, is still on the cards, according to the Avatar director.
According to James Cameron, his long-gestating remake of Fantastic Voyage is still happening. That in itself is newsworthy given how long Cameron has been talking about this project. The filmmaker wrote a screenplay for the film decades ago, but in the wake of Titanic's success in 1997, he became transfixed with realising the alien world of Pandora onscreen and with the exception of a couple of documentary films, has only released two Avatar films in the quarter century since.
As far as Fantastic Voyage goes, Cameron’s plan has long been to produce the film, with Gullermo del Toro being the man to direct it. We’ve seen Cameron ‘godfather’ films before while working on the never-ending production of the Avatar films, not least in 2019 where he helped shepherd two films into the world, Terminator: Dark Fate and Alita: Battle Angel. Del Toro is rather busy himself, given he’s currently working on Dr Frankenstein while also looking to helm an animated take on Kazuo Ishiguro’s celebrated fantasy tale, The Buried Giant.
According to World of Reel, though, Cameron recently told an assembled crowd in Paris that Fantastic Voyage was still happening and, even more curiously, that it would be happening soon. “We’ve been developing it for a number of years,” he told the audience at a post-screening Q&A, “and we plan to go ahead with it very soon. Raquel Welch is not available, but we think we can make a pretty good movie.”
Welch, along with Donald Pleasence, was among the stars in the 1966 original, in which miniaturisation technology was used to shrink down a submarine full of scientists, who were then injected into the body of a stricken agent in order to operate on a deadly blood clot from within. An extraordinarily expensive film for its day (budget: over $5m), Fantastic Voyage’s concept was later borrowed by director Joe Dante in his 1987 sci-fi comedy, Innerspace.
As far as the remake actually happening, who knows? Cameron told us last year that we’d be getting more Battle Angel and expressed a desire to direct a Hiroshima movie based on Charles R Pellegrino’s nonfiction novel, The Last Train From Hiroshima: The Survivors Lost Book. Cameron is rampantly creative, but as with all rampant creatives, he can sometimes talk up projects that he never quite gets around to realising.
Still, the project is alive, even if we’re not sure what state it’s in or if it will ever release. Should we hear more news on James Cameron’s remake of Fantastic Voyage, you can be sure we’ll let you know.
