Joseph Kosinski seems to love remaking flop Disney SF movies of the '70s and '80s. He’s putting the finishing touches to Tron Legacy and after that he’ll be moving onto a remake of The Black Hole. And despite both original films tanking at the box office on release, there's a huge buzz about the new versions thanks to decades of the rewatched and rewatched on video and DVD.
And Kosinski has been chatting to MTV about his plans for the new The Black Hole. The original was about a the crew of a small exploratory craft discovering the vast, Crystal Palace-like spaceship The Cygnus hovering at the edge of a Black Hole. It is commanded by the Captain Nemo-esque Dr Hans Reinhardt , aided and abetted by his burly robot bootboy Maximillian and his robot army.
"For me, it would be taking ideas and iconic elements that struck me as timeless and cool and preserving them while weaving a new story around them that's a little more '2001,'" says Kosinski. "What sticks out most is the robot Maximillian. The blades and the vicious killing of Anthony Perkins. That freaked me out and that's definitely going to be an element that will be preserved. The design of the Cygnus ship is one of the most iconic spaceships ever put to film."
Kosinski also says the science will be more realistic this time. "From a conceptual point of view, we know so much more about black holes now, the crazy things that go on as you approach them due to the intense gravitational pull and the effects on time and space. All that could provide us with some really cool film if we embrace it in a hard science way."
But will it have an ending that actually makes sense?
