It's been 12 years since Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing was released and, for the most part, the movie has largely been forgotten. It wasn't a patch on the 1982 classic and has largely been criticised for its use of visual effects over practical ones.
The movie revolved around Norwegian researchers who discovered an alien ship buried in the ice, with palaeontologist Kate Lloyd joining the team at the isolated Arctic outpost to investigate.
There, she finds an organism that appears to have perished in the crash eons ago but is, in fact, about to awake. Freed from its icy prison, the insidious life-form goes on the attack. Paranoia spreads like wildfire among the crew as they fight to survive against a creature that assumes the shapes of its victims.
Ahsoka star Mary Elizabeth Winstead led the cast and there were once plans for a sequel. Talking to SyFy Wire, Heijningen Jr. shared new details about where he'd hoped to take the horror/sci-fi franchise had it become a reality.
"We fantasized about a sequel," he explains. "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 the rig. I liked the oil rig mayhem idea."
The Thing only earned $31.5 million on a $38 million budget so a follow-up was never going to happen. However, the filmmaker acknowledges that the movie simply wasn't what fans wanted.
"The Carpenter version was so good and a lot of fans were almost offended by the prequel and didn’t see the necessity for a follow-up. But now I fully understand that it was a bit early," he says before admitting they shouldn't have used CGI to bolster the practical special effects created by Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr.
"I know this is a debated topic, but looking back, we were caught in a cross-zone where animatronics were old-fashioned and the CGI wasn’t good enough. We made the wrong decision to do it in post-production [when it came to] making the monster design in the computer. I regret that now."
As for what he'd change, Heijningen Jr. added, "Better character development, less CGI, and more paranoia between the characters. The Thing is about not being able to trust anybody. That could have been explored further."
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