It looks like we may be seeing Jaws vs. Jurassic Park on the big screen soon after all. After years of pre-production troubles with Steve Alten's Meg, published in 1997, the project has been picked up once again by new buyers after New Line dropped it last year. The news comes from the Los Angeles Times in a piece about the history surrounding the trouble past of bringing the sea traveling dinosaur to the big screen.
Here's a highlight of the turnaround.
In recent weeks, however, a new financier has stepped forward with plans to finally bring "Meg" to the big screen. Apelles Publishing Inc. of Abington, Va., has optioned the rights from Alten with veteran Hollywood producers Lawrence Gordon ("Die Hard") and Lloyd Levin ("Boogie Nights"), along with Virginia-based film financing consultant Belle Avery, set to produce. Gordon and Levin have a track record of taking projects put in turnaround at one studio and successfully setting them up at another, the latest examples being "Watchmen" at Warner Bros. and "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" at Universal.
Yep. It's about a megalodon.
The film rights were sold before the book was even published. The studio loved the catchy short title and the simple two word pitch... "Jurassic shark."
Unfortunately, the book isn't very good. The characters are bland and the logic is absurd. There is a scene where the megalodon jumps out of the water to snatch a helicopter out of the sky. The extent of the author's research is revealed in the first few pages in a prologue set in the Jurassic period wherein a T-Rex is killed by a megalodon. Megalodons didn't appear until about 40 million years after T-Rex was extinct. The rest of the book is just as well researched.
Dude, its about a giant Shark still alive today. How accurate does it really have to be? And anyone who has seen Planet Earth knows a Great White Shark can jump about 10 feet out of the water, so who knows, maybe a MEG can jump higher......I wonder if the shark will wear a pink hat and glasses?
Nice one PONYBOY..lol
You know what I dont get about those crappy sc-fi channel movies is why dont they merge the budgets of say 6-8 of the movies they put out a month and make one fairly decent movie every 4-6 months? Not to mention hire someone older then 10 to write the things and get better actors then what is maybe found on a skin-emax 1am movie..lol
I mean really, what could the budget of a movie like Boa vs Python 4 really be? 3,000 4,000 dollars?
All their Sci-fi F/X budget must go into BSG because those F/X are frakkin fantastic!
There's already been two Sci-Fi-quality (i.e., craptastic) Megalodon movies made for the direct-to-video market. They were both released in 2002 to cash in on the anticipated release of the big-budget Meg. They probably weren't expecting Meg to go into development hell to the degree which it has.
Bone Eater... That sounds like a porn movie.
What gets me is SciFi can pay for all these crappy movies that no one watches, but they wouldn't pony up the cash to keep Dresden Files on the air. Jerks.
Oh, and you know if this movie ever sees the light of day (on SciFi or anywhere else), they'll be all over the place saying they don't want to be compared to Jaws. Come on...
I haven't read the book but I imagine with a big budget & FX, a better script and some big stars this could be turned into a fun summer movie.
Though those movies seem pretty low-brow, Sci-Fi channel wouldn't be making those "Saturday monster movie of the week" if they didn't pull in the ratings, which is what they do. Wired magazine did an article in '04 about the network marketing guys who produce the movies. Yeah, I said marketing guys. They make them on the cheap for an eager audience:
"Audiences are attracted to the Sci Fi Channel's Saturday night monster movies not because they're idiots, or because they smoke too much marijuana, but because at the end of a long week they enjoy a free pass to follow a bit of random anxiety to its most gloriously paranoid conclusion - and laugh."
Here's the original article. It's an interesting read:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/scifi.html
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