The Tomorrow War director Chris McKay was announced as replacing Dexter Fletcher (Rocketman, The Saint) on Universal’s Renfield movie, based on the Dracula assistant, and part of their Universal Monsters umbrella. The kicker is that the horror film will be a comedy written by Rick & Morty’s Ryan Ridley and McKay is teasing that it’s violence will be taking cues from Sam Raimi’s beloved Evil Dead 2.
“Renfield is a story about Dracula’s assistant set in modern times, and it’s kind of a codependency success story. And it’s a comedy. It’s a horror movie. It’s an action movie. It’s about bad bosses. It’s written by Ryan Ridley, who worked on Rick and Morty, and it’s a really funny and emotional. It’s gonna be like a hard-R action movie, crazy-violent in an Evil Dead 2 kind of way. That’s gonna be fun,” the filmmaker revealed about his upcoming Renfield project at Universal Pictures.
If you’re unfamiliar with the 1987 film directed by Sam Raimi, it was pretty much a remake of the previous Evil Dead film, however, taking a slapstick angle as the original was a slightly more straightforward horror movie without as many comedic elements.
Ryan Ridley is part a group of Rick & Morty writers moving into the realm of live-action projects as Michael Waldron is behind the Loki series, worked with Sam Raimi on Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness, and is attached for untitled Star Wars movie that will be produced by Kevin Feige. Jessica Gao is the head writing on Marvel’s She-Hulk series and Jeff Loveness is behind the script for Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania.
EVIL DEAD 2 – The second of three films in the Evil Dead series is part horror, part comedy, with Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) once again battling horrifying demons at a secluded cabin in the woods. After discovering an audiotape left by a college professor that contains voices reading from the Book of the Dead, Ash’s girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) becomes possessed by evil spirits that are awakened by the voices on the tape. Ash soon discovers there is no escaping the woods.
SOURCE: VARIETY
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