I love all the fake trailers in Grindhouse, but Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving is the real deal. I think that with a judicious gag trim or two you could put that on one of the 42nd Street Forever trailer compilation DVDs and nobody would blink. It’s just that perfect.
Eli has been talking about making a real Thanksgiving film ever since, and I think that if the release of the excellent Hostel Part II* had been handled better (why didn’t they open this movie in the same spot as Hostel? Madness to try for the summer), we’d have seen it by now. And he hasn’t given up on getting Thanksgiving made, and now he has a plan.
Once he’s done with his Inglorious Basterds duties, Eli intends to begin working on his next project. “I wanted to do something along the lines of ‘Transformers’ or ‘Cloverfield’ that was a little more science fiction-based, and with lots of chaos and mass destruction.” he tells MTV. That movie he sees budgeted at 80 million dollars (ambitiously low, I’d say), and then he wants to sneak Thanksgiving into that.
Says Roth: “I want to do an $80 million dollar movie, and then schedule three weeks at the end to quickly shoot a $5 million dollar movie.”
So what he’s going to shop around is a duo of movies, costing 85 million total. That seems actually incredibly smart, especially since it seems like that Thanksgiving – which Rothe describes as “the sickest, bloodiest, most violent slasher movie,” with the highest body count ever – could reasonably make back the budget of both films in a couple weeks of release.
Here’s hoping Eli’s smuggling plan works. I can’t wait to see both movies.
*fuck you, I’m serious.