Two Actors Lined Up For The Thing Remake | SPIKE

Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Live Free or Die Hard) and Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom) have been cast in Matthijs Van Heijningen's remake of John Carpenter's remake of Howard Hawks's The Thing From Another World. Whew! This is one of the more complicated remakes around -- wait a minute, wasn't this going to be a prequel?

The article in The Hollywood Reporter doesn't say anything about Heijningen's movie being a prequel to Carpenter's The Thing. Which, in all honesty, sounds much better. A prequel really didn't make much sense, and really sounded like it was closer in spirit to a remake, anyway:

Winstead will play a Ph.D. candidate who joins a Norwegian research team in Antarctica after it discovers an alien ship in the ice. When a trapped organism is freed and begins a series of attacks, she is forced to team with a blue-collar mercenary helicopter pilot (Edgerton) to stop the rampage.

This could be really awesome now that special effects have come so far since the '80s, but then again, Carpenter's in-camera monster effects were really amazing, and terrifying. It seems like Carpenter's The Thing has aged so well that another remake isn't really necessary, but try convincing the studio of that.

Hopefully this new remake lives up to the previous ones. Even the 1951 original by Hawks was pretty damn scary. They say three's a crowd...guess we'll find out if that's true.

Source: Universal Pictures