Years ago (in what had to have been among my first articles for CHUD) I wrote about the possibility of a Cronenberg-helmed remake of The Fly. At the time this was replacing rumors that the film was up for a simple Hollywood reboot, so the dubious idea of Cronenberg retreading that ground was at least interesting. It was a weird idea, but surely better than it going through the machine and suffering a similar fate as it appears another classic 80s remake, The Thing, has suffered. In any event, that remake obviously never manifested, and now Shock Till You Drop has gotten a little clarification from Cronenberg himself about that rumored project…

“The Fly [3?] is not exactly a remake, it’s sort of a sequel, kinda. Yeah, that was a thing. I’ve written a script of that, and I don’t know if that’s going to really happen, but that has to do with Fox.”

I like that Cronenberg says “that was a thing.” I use that phrase a lot and get shit for it frequently.

So Dave has a script that somehow expands the established Fly universe sitting on a hard drive somewhere, and nothing has come of it? I’m glad details haven’t leaked if it’s a project that could still potentially materialize, but then again if he’s not exceptionally passionate about it I’m not sure it’s a good idea anyway. I think we’d all love to see Cronenberg dip his toe back in the body horror genre one of these days, and a Fly revisit could be a fun way of doing it, but only if he really believes in it.

Since the writer/director put pen to paper on this sequel/sidequel himself, I assume it has nothing to do with the scrapped Fly 2 treatment that had Seth Brundle return as a trapped consciousness in a computer program. So what characters might it include, and in what ways might he expand the story? Could be quite a while before we ever find out.

The past few years we’ve heard much more about an Eastern Promises sequel, and Cronenberg is a little more willing to acknolwedge that project as a possibility. Again though, he mentions only that a second draft is being written and then “we’ll see.”

Clearly Cronenberg is not a man to go out on a limb and jinx himself.

Now that A Dangerous Method is getting out there, what direction would you like to see Cronenberg move in next after Cosmopolis?

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(via BadassDigest)