Guillermo del Toro's Lovecraft Movie is All But Dead

One of the few pieces of truly exciting news for a mouth-breathing sci-fi and horror nerd like myself to come around in the last year was the news that Guillermo del Toro, the batshit creative mind behind Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth and Blade II, was planning on tackling an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness. The story, about a group of scientists who discover horrific alien creatures on an expedition to the Antarctic, felt like a perfect fit for del Toro's visually inventive, creepy-as-hell sensibilities as a director of horror. 
 
Unfortunately, it appears that project is not to be--at least for the foreseeable future. While del Toro had, at one point, wowed Universal with a dazzling presentation on the film--a presentation that got him funding to begin pre-production and early creature design work-- the New Yorker is reporting that Universal is no longer willing to fund the project. The writer, who recently profiled del Toro in a larger story, received the following email from the director regarding the Madness adaptation:

Madness has gone dark. The ‘R’ did us in.

Indeed, del Toro was evidently unwilling to budge on the film's R-rated content. The New Yorker article states that it wasn't designed to be a terribly gory film, but one full of deeply unsettling imagery that the MPAA wasn't likely to give a PG-13 pass to. Ultimately, the film's projected $150 million budget--even with names like James Cameron and Tom Cruise attached to the project in various functions--was deemed too unwieldy for the film that could not be marketed to a mass audience.

While del Toro could, and almost assuredly will shop the project to another studio, he is otherwise occupied by a project called Pacific Rim, which is itself an original world-set monster movie--one aimed at a PG-13 audience. Thus, it may be some time before the Mountains of Madness are traversed, if they ever are at all.