 |
| Image courtesy Universal Pictures |
The 2011 prequel to The Thing was a box office flop and critical disaster. But prior to its release, the director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. had plans to continue the story with Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character after she escapes from the shape changing alien. Due to poor returns at the theater and the altogether failure of a studio that insisted that practical effects be replaced with CGI, this version of The Thing may have done alright in the story department, aligning perfectly with John Carpenter's previous film, but ended up being another symptom of studio toiling causing the creativity of the film to suffer.
Recently, the director told SYFY Wire that they had dreamed up a plan for a continuation of Winstead's character Kate Lloyd that would have seen her story movie to an isolated Antarctic oil rig where the alien being would have followed her to. He had this to say:
"We fantasized about a sequel. Kate would escape and would be picked up at sea and tries to warn the world at an oil platform near the South Pole. The monster would break loose on the rig. I liked the oil rig idea."
Obviously this will never happen now. There was a movie made by the same visual effects crew called Harbinger Down where they used the practical fx they had designed for The Thing prior to the studio shelving their work. John Carpenter has also teased an upcoming continuation of is classic movie.