It’s really quite difficult to keep track of all the Hollywood remakes that keep on piling up.
So I wasn’t sure if there was indeed a remake of The Black Hole in the works, or if I was just trippin’ one day, but apparently it’s true there is/was going to be one – at least at some point.
It’s an uneven film, but The Black Hole came along at an interesting time in Disney’s history, when the company was trying to move into more serious, PG rated movies. Of course, The Black Hole also boasted a big budget for its time (about $20 million or so), and state of the art special effects, which is absolutely the best part of the film, still holds up after all these years.
The film also had a bizarre cast with Robert Forester, Anthony Perkins, Yvette Mimieux, Ernest Borgnine, Maximilian Schell, and Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens doing the voices of V.I.N.C.E.N.T. and Bob, two robots.
On the FX team was Disney veteran Peter Ellenshaw, who created the groundbreaking effects for Mary Poppins, and his son Harrison Ellenshaw, who worked on Star Wars and Tron.
The Black Hole didn’t do well on it’s initial release, it hit theaters during an odd, transitional period for Disney before the studio was resurrected by Michael Eisner, and it was lumped in with a lot of big $20-40 million dollar movies that were getting a lot of heat in the press at the time like 1941 and The Blues Brothers.
Back then, the press found it appalling that any movie could cost that much, and took many filmmakers to task for spending that much.
Now like Logan’s Run, and other epic ’70s sci-fi films, The Black Hole definitely has it’s fan base, and is worth checking out today in spite of its flaws.
There’s also another bit of Tron serendipity with the planned remake, because Joe Kosinski, director of Tron Legacy, was slated to direct, and as he told ComicBookMovie, the new Black Hole would be “a re-imagining” of the original. “It would be taking ideas and iconic elements that struck me as timeless and cool and preserving them while weaving a new story around them that’s a little more 2001…”
“From a conceptual point of view, we know so much more about black holes now, the crazy things that go on as you approach them due to the intense gravitational pull and the effects on time and space,” Kosniski continued.
”All that could provide us with a really cool film if we embrace it in a hard science way.”
Whether we’ll ever see a remake of The Black Hole, or whether it will be lost in the black hole of Hollywood development hell still remains to be seen.
In the meantime, again, the original is well worth checking out again just for the special effects alone.
