It’s been four years since Disney announced their intention to adapt their popular Tower of Terror ride as a film, with Jurassic World Rebirth star Scarlett Johansson set to produce the film. After a lengthy dispute with Disney over her MCU film Black Widow, the project was still left standing, but we haven’t had any updates on the project since — until now.
Johannson just revealed to Entertainment Weekly that the film is “taking shape,” the first news we’ve heard of it since its announcement. According to Johansson, the film is difficult to develop because the ride’s storyline — of a Hollywood hotel haunted by the ghosts of a family who died when lightning struck the building — really “doesn’t have so much to dig into.”
“It's a hard nut to crack. Harder than you think, because the ride itself, there's some lore to it, but it's… I don't want to say thin, but it is, kind of!,” she told EW. “That's part of the mystery of the ride. It's been a fun project to work on, because it's a blue sky project. It has also proved to be a hard nut to crack. But, we'll crack the case of it.”
It’s an odd statement, considering the ride is based on Rod Serling’s cult series The Twilight Zone, which more than proved that simple concepts are often the most terrifying. While the film will certainly be significantly more Disneyfied than its television origins — see also: both of their Haunted Mansion adaptations — it remains to be seen just what direction they’ll take the story.
This film, of course, is not the first time Disney had adapted the popular drop-tower ride into a film. Predating their popular Pirates of the Caribbean films by almost a decade, Disney released Tower of Terror in 1997, starring Steven Gutenberg and Kirsten Dunst. The first-ever attempt to adapt any of their attractions as film, the movie — which is currently unavailable to watch anywhere — completely gutted the Twilight Zone aspects of the story, and has largely been overshadowed by more recent films like Jungle Cruise.
No release date has been set for Johansson’s Tower of Terror movie. Stay tuned to FANGORIA for more updates.
