Twilight has claimed another victim. First, director Catherine Hardwicke departed from the planned sequel, New Moon, over the weekend and now the phenomenally successful vampire movie has put the kibosh on… an entirely different movie.
At least, that’s according to Platinum Dunes’ Brad Fuller, producer of the long-mooted remake of Kathryn Bigelow’s classic horror, Near Dark.Which, it seems, is set to remain long-mooted.
“Near Dark is probably not going to happen,” he confirmed, talking exclusively to Empire. “I think that Twilight was the same type of thing we were going for although Near Dark was a much darker, sexier, rated R version of that. But I’m concerned that, conceptually, that Near Dark and Twilight are too similar in terms of a vampire movie. For now, that movie is on hold.”
Now here’s something new – usually, when a movie is a surprise hit, you can’t move in Hollywood without bumping into a similar project designed to cash in. It’s not often when the opposite occurs, and a hit movie causes another in development to stall. But that seems to be the case with the remake of Bigelow’s 1987 vampire western, in which a young farmer (Adrian Pasdar) falls in love with a girl (Jenny Wright), only to find that she’s part of a family of utterly demented vampires, played by half the cast of Aliens.
“The concept of ‘one person’s a vampire, the other person isn’t and they’re in love,’ with the success of that film, we would not measure up,” continued Fuller. “It’s not the right time to make that.”
There are, of course, two ways to look at this. Diehard fans of the original will be relieved that the remake has been stopped in its tracks, but it also seems a shame. Near Dark is, as Fuller says, darker, rougher and more adult than Twilight, and it strikes us that this town was big enough for both of ’em. We’ve got a feeling, though, that we haven’t heard the last of the Near Dark remake. After all, it’s hard to keep a good vampire down…