John Carpenter Wants to Make a Sequel to ‘The Thing’
John Carpenter hasn’t made a new movie in 12 years. His last film project that got released in theaters was the small horror film The Ward. It grossed about half of its $10 million budget and came and went very quickly. Since then, Carpenter has worked on music, both for films and for albums, and developed several projects that never quite came together.
At 74 years old, one sometimes worries that Carpenter is unofficially retired from moviemaking, and The Ward may well be the last film we ever get from him. But he at least does have a few inklings about making new projects. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter about the new 4K edition of his Escape From L.A. — Carpenter was asked whether there were any other movies from his filmography that he wishes had a sequel. And, as it turns out, there is.
“I would like to do a sequel to The Thing, or a continuation, something like that,” Carpenter told THR. “But I don’t know. See, there are a lot of things in this world I don’t know.”
Carpenter’s The Thing was released in 1982 and told the story of a shape-shifting alien systematically assimilating the members of a team of scientists at a remote outpost in Antarctica. The film was not a hit on its initial release, but over time it’s become one of the most critically acclaimed and beloved horror films of the 1980s — if not the entire history of motion pictures. As its reputation rose, it’s started to get a variety of ancillary products and follow-ups. There’s been comic books and board games, and a video game from 2002 that acted as a sequel to Carpenter’s film (with Carpenter’s approval). In 2011, Universal released a prequel film, also called The Thing, that showed how the alien came to arrive the Antaractic outpost.
An actual Thing film sequel never happened though, and I have to imagine if Carpenter himself wanted to direct it, every single horror fan on the planet would be excited about that news. Given Carpenter’s well-documented hesitation to commit to a new project in the last dozen years, I remain skeptical it will ever happen. But it would be mighty cool if it did.
The 4K version of Escape From L.A. will be available tomorrow.