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Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes to Stop Remaking Horror Films
A Quiet Place production company Platinum Dunes is headed in a new direction. Moving forward, the production company will no longer remake classic horror films but rather focus on original concepts. Platinum Dunes got their start with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003, a remake of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 original. The film was directed by Marcus Nispel and grossed over $107 million against an estimated production budget of just $9.5 million. As a follow-up, Platinum Dunes’ released The Amityville Horror in 2005 – another remake that matched its predecessor at the box office, albeit with a slightly higher budget.
Since then, all of Platinum Dunes’ reboots have been financially successful, as 2009’s Friday the 13th earned almost $100 million and 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street netted approximately $116 million. While those films were commercially successful, they weren’t exactly critically-acclaimed, and Platinum Dunes has been busy revamping their strategy in recent years as a result. The Purge and Ouija franchises have been among their most successful projects – and they are looking to continue that success with even more original movies.
In an interview with CinePOP, Platinum Dunes co-founder Brad Fuller, who produced A Quiet Place, stated that “We’ve rebooted enough. We’ve done all of our [rebooted] horror movies. We’re not going to be doing that anymore.”
This is an interesting move for Platinum Dunes, which relied heavily on horror remakes to help them get off the ground in the early 2000s – but it’s in these original projects that their success truly starts to shine. As previously mentioned, The Purge and Ouija franchises are among their most popular brands, with A Quiet Place coming out on top. The film is has been almost unanimously praised by critics and audiences like, and it’s currently on its way to box office glory. That’s something Platinum Dunes is looking to build off of in the future. Producer and studio co-founder Andrew Form added:
“For us, as a company, we’re always looking for original material. And the idea of finding something original was important for us. We made a film where there’s two to three minutes of talking in the movie, where sound is a full character, and it feels like audiences are really responding to those ingredients.”
If Platinum Dunes can continue to produce top-tier movies like A Quiet Place, then there’s a good chance they could rid themselves of the stigma of being associated with Michael Bay, despite the fact that Bay hasn’t directed a single movie his studio has produced (something that starkly differentiates from other filmmakers). Next up for the studio is The First Purge this summer, with Bumblebee: The Movie hitting theaters this December, thus marking the first Transformers movie in Paramount Pictures’ franchise that hasn’t been directed by Bay.
