Among James Wan’s post-Aquaman projects is an adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s The Call Of Cthulhu – and it’ll also be a videogame, a report suggests.
James Wan has succeeded in adding a fishy accent to the festive season with Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom, out in cinemas now. But it seems Wan isn’t finished with the salty depths – among the director’s various upcoming projects is an adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s cosmic horror story, The Call Of Cthulhu.
Deadline, which mentions this in a broader report about videogame adaptations, describes it as a ‘dream project’ for Wan, and one the filmmaker’s “been quietly working on for five years”.
Originally published in 1928, The Call Of Cthulhu is a short yet highly influential tale about a mysterious sect that worships an octopus-like deity from the depths of time and space. The story was the starting point for the wider Cthulhu Mythos, which was developed both by Lovecraft and a circle of other weird fiction writers including August Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith.
It isn’t clear from the report whether Wan’s project will be a TV show or movie, though it’s potentially the latter given his track record in filmmaking. What’s clearer is that The Call Of Cthulhu will also be a videogame, with Deadline revealing that a conglomerate of investors has formed a fund called Stars-Hana, devoted to turning a bunch of projects into games, comics and assorted merch.
Its slate of projects is quite a diverse one; aside from The Call Of Cthulhu, others listed include two other Wan ventures (Mass Extinction and GMO), The Goxfather, a cryptocurrency biopic headed up by Jon M Chu, two projects with Sam Raimi’s name attached (Every House Is Haunted and The Burden), and, er, The Garfield Movie.
There are also some details about those other two non-Cthulhu projects. GMO is a sci-fi thriller about a drug that “solves a global famine but whose side effects drastically accelerate the ageing process.”
Sounds a bit like M Night Shyamalan’s Old without the beach holiday.
Then there’s Mass Extinction, in which “humans have lost Earth to an alien virus, but remnants of our species still survive on the Moon. Visiting Earth in search of a cure for the disease, explorers “fight off a host of mutated animals and humans.”
Sounds a bit like M Night Shyamalan’s After Earth but without the Smiths.
That’s quite a slate of genre projects, and it’s currently anyone’s guess which will appear first. Still: Wan’s Aquaman career phase may be over for now, but he evidently has plenty of other things to keep him busy over the next few years.
The lingering question on our minds is, will Wan’s The Call Of Cthulhu see its octopus-god playing the drums...?
