James Wan’s Long-Awaited H.P. Lovecraft Adaptation Is Currently Facing 1 Hurdle

After nearly a decade of trying to get the film off the ground, James Wan has a mixed update on his Call of Cthulhu adaptation.

Wan, best known for his work co-creating the Insidious, Saw and Conjuring franchises, was first confirmed to be developing an adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft horror short story in late 2023, having been developing it for five years prior on his own volition. The years since haven’t seen many updates for the film, with Wan previously teasing in April 2024 that his script was going to be a “hard sell.”

Now, in honor of the release of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, ScreenRant‘s Ash Crossan interviewed James Wan and got an update on his Call of Cthulhu adaptation. The genre vet confirmed the film is still in development, and is one “I’ve been wanting to do for a while,” but is currently facing the hurdle that Lovecraftian films “are not cheap movies.” Further admitting them to be “very hard to try and get them off the ground,” Wan concluded by assuring “I’m just going to keep chipping away at it.”

The world of H.P. Lovecraft has been adapted in a variety of ways over the past century, with everything from the hyperstylized works of Stuart Gordon, best known for Re-Animator and From Beyond, to the cult classic Dunwich Horror. The author has also inspired a variety of other filmmakers, from John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness to William Eubank’s Underwater and David Prior’s The Empty Man adaptation.

Wan certainly isn’t the first filmmaker to find their dream to adapt a Lovecraft tale for the screen met with a troublesome road due to cost. Guillermo del Toro memorably was teaming with Universal Pictures and James Cameron on an adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness, planning for an R-rated production, only for the combination of high cost and inadvertent similarities to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus led to the project being shelved. While he had begun revisiting the concept in early 2024 with a potential animated format, he later confirmed it was still shelved.

Wan may not have fully divulged how costly his Call of Cthulhu adaptation is looking to be, but to his point about selling such a film, the Lovecraftian genre hasn’t had any major box office success in a long time. The aforementioned Underwater and Empty Man were both box office failures, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, though the latter also from getting an infamously quiet release without marketing. Both Color Out of Space and Suitable Flesh were critical hits, but due to similarly limited theatrical releases, didn’t generate much buzz at the box office.

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Despite finances currently being a hurdle for the filmmaker, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Wan won’t find the producers he needs to get his Call of Cthulhu adaptation off the ground. Across his 11 directorial efforts, he has grossed over $4 billion at the worldwide box office, with the first Aquaman and Furious 7 being his most successful, while his horror outings have almost exclusively been hits during their theatrical runs, with the sole exception being 2021’s Malignant, which fell $6 million shy of its budget due to its COVID-19 and HBO Max simultaneous release.

Having spent so much time in the world of Hollywood blockbusters, Wan’s return to the director’s chair for the horror genre is still arguably a highly anticipated thing, which, combined with a visionary script, could see Call of Cthulhu start gaining some steam in the near future. However, with Wan also busy directing and producing an English adaptation of The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil for Paramount, he may still have a way to go before tackling the Lovecraft classic.

Release Date

October 7, 2005

Runtime

47 minutes

Director

Andrew Leman

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