Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski is keen to revisit the live action remake of The Black Hole that Disney cancelled a decade ago.
Director Joseph Kosinski is riding high at the moment and as such, lots of people seem to be asking him what he’d like to do next. With the seemingly-unstoppable Top Gun: Maverick zooming past the billion dollar mark in cinemas, not to mention Spiderhead releasing on Netflix to good reviews, Kosinski has two wildly different films on release that show off his talents. And if the filmmaker has his way, a future project might just see him combine both of those styles.
As you most likely know, Top Gun: Maverick is a loud and bombastic action movie, a near-perfect refinement of the blockbuster formula. Spiderhead on the other hand is a smaller, self-contained and entirely cerebral film, the sort of mid-priced studio film that studios make less and less of these days.
When asked by The Wrap about projects he’d like to tackle in the future, Kosinski has expressed a desire to return to a remake of a film that embodies both of those dimensions: Disney’s The Black Hole.
Emerging from the strangest (and perhaps most interesting) era of Disney’s history as a studio, The Black Hole released in 1982 to poor reviews and commercial failure. Along with The Black Cauldron, the film’s perceived ‘darkness’ was seen as instrumental in ushering in an era of major change for the studio.
For Kosinski however, the film remains one of Disney’s most interesting properties, with the filmmaker stating “I still feel like that movie is one of the most unique that Disney’s ever made, the original, I mean. It’s wild.”
Backtrack to the middle of the last decade and Kosinski had just made TRON: Legacy for the studio and was exploring future projects with Disney, including a sequel for that particular movie. Whilst the reasons a sequel to TRON: Legacy never happened are fairly well documented, it’s less well-known that Kosinski was also exploring a remake of The Black Hole. When Legacy didn’t make the kind of money Disney was hoping for, that made presumably made Kosinski’s position more difficult. The fact that the concept for his take on The Black Hole was reportedly similar to Christopher Nolan’s then-newly-released Interstellar probably didn’t help either.
Kosinski though is still keen to take another look at the project, adding “the idea of a journey to a black hole is still one of those things that is very intriguing because it’s not science fiction. They really exist, and all the effects that happen around them are real physics. So there is a great story to be told about that journey. I just, at this point, I haven’t figured out what that would be for me yet.”
Whatever happens, it won’t be the director’s next film as he has signed up with Apple to make a big budget racing film starring Brad Pitt. But with his projects continuing to impress both critically and commercially, we wonder if that will be enough to tempt Disney into revisiting a property that hails from an era that the studio has very much distanced itself from? Time, of course, will tell…
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