The A24 adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque Of The Red Death is to shoot this year, with Mikey Madison replacing Sydney Sweeney in the lead.
In a story that we covered in January, A24 and Picturestart are teaming to tackle an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic short story, The Masque Of The Red Death. It centres on a group of privileged nobles who lock themselves away for endless revelry while a plague decimates the outside world. You can probably imagine that not everything goes to plan for the wealthy partygoers.
It’ll be the feature debut of New York filmmaker and theatre director Charlie Polinger, and the project is said to be ‘wildly revisionist and darkly comedic.’
The whole ‘eat the rich’ genre continues to surge, and should this project not deviate too far from the source material, we could be looking at another film in what is fast becoming a genre with a rather high quality bar. The Menu, Triangle of Sadness and of course Parasite are three of the most impressive films we’ve seen that explore these themes.
There’s been a major change in the film’s casting, however. Sydney Sweeney was originally in place to play the film’s lead in a continuation of her growing dominance in the horror genre. Last year’s Immaculate was easily her strongest film in the genre so far, and partnering with a boutique studio like Neon was surely part of the reason for that success. The Masque Of The Red Death would have seen Sweeney continuing that strategy with A24.
Those plans have now had to change, reportedly (thanks, The Hollywood Reporter) because of Sweeney’s commitment to star in Legendary Entertainment’s Gundam. It looks like both productions are set to shoot at roughly the same time – the end of this year – and so Sweeney will be making the giant robot movie rather than the artsy horror.
While her bank account may be the beneficiary of that decision, so is Mikey Madison by all accounts. The Oscar-winning star of Anora has been flirting with big commercial sci-fi projects herself, reportedly coming pretty close to signing up for Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter before ultimately electing not to go in that direction. According to the report though, Madison has replaced Sweeney on The Masque Of The Red Death and will now play the lead.
Continuing to develop her artistic cachet with an A24 movie while also signing up for more mainstream fare such as Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil project for Sony looks like a canny move by Madison from where we’re sitting, although admittedly that is at a laptop in the West Midlands, not a posh condo in the Hollywood Hills.
The Masque Of The Red Death was previously adapted by director-producer Roger Corman in 1964. With a typically imposing performance from Vincent Price at its centre and some mesmerising cinematography from Nicolas Roeg, it was perhaps the best (and certainly most beautiful looking) of Corman’s cycle of Poe films of that period.
We’ll bring you more on The Masque Of The Red Death as we hear it.
