It’s been a while since we heard anything about the upcoming Fantastic Voyage remake — almost two years, to be precise — but a new report claims the film will begin shooting in just five months.
The 1966 original starred Raquel Welch, Stephen Boyd, and Donald Pleasance as members of a rescue team on board a nuclear submarine who are shrunken down and injected into the body of a dying Soviet scientist, with the task of repairing a blood clot in his brain. However, they have just one hour to complete the surgery within the man’s body before they revert back to regular size. It’s definitely an exciting sci-fi plot, and one that’s been parodied countless times (most recently in the Rick and Morty episode “Anatomy Park”), so the idea of a remake isn’t all that surprising. What is surprising is how soon it’s supposedly going into production.
As I implied already, our last update on this film was in January 2016, when director Guillermo del Toro was in talks with 20th Century Fox to direct. The new report from Omega Underground says filming will start in Toronto this January, and while they speculate that del Toro is still involved since he’s filmed his last three movies in the Canadian city, they don’t confirm it. Whose involvement they do confirm is James Cameron, who is producing the film alongside Lightstorm Entertainment’s Jon Landu. It’s believed the movie will be filmed with Cameron’s stereoscopic 3D cameras; the ones he famously invented for Avatar.
With post-production going on now for Pacific Rim: Uprising, it does appear that del Toro has a clean slate for January, but given that we’ve gone twenty months without hearing any news on The Fantastic Voyage (no casting news, no script — nothing), we find it hard to believe that it’s going to start filming in January — del Toro or not. So with that in mind, we’re taking this report with a healthy dose of salt.
