Disney's The Black Hole is an often forgotten movie in the studio's history. As a live-action science fiction film from the late 1970's the movie was an odd choice back then, which made the news that Disney wanted to remake it also a bit bizarre. However, we haven't heard much about the project in several years and the man who wrote the script for it thinks that the film's strangeness may be the reason that it's still sitting on the shelf.
Black Hole was an amazing experience. That was one of those movies I was stuck on until I cracked the beginning, and suddenly it just started to flow. I loved that script. It sits uneasily in Disney's world as a dark epic, and Disney is in a very colorful place. They already have multiple big space epics going, so I don't know how or whether it'll find its way to light of day, but I sure wrote a heck of a movie and was thrilled to do it. It was very faithful to the original but clever in all the ways in that first film was silly, I hope.
Disney produced The Black Hole in 1979 for the same reason that Paramount brought back Star Trek and the same reason that Ion Productions made Moonraker their next James Bond adaptation, because two years previously a little movie called Star Wars came out and changed the world. Everybody had to make a science fiction movie and The Black Hole was what Disney did. But as Jon Spaihts tells Slashfilm, Disney doesn't really need their original space epic that competed with Star Wars because now they actually have Star Wars for that. On top of that, they have The Guardians of the Galaxy coming from Marvel in case they feel like they need more sci-fi.
Disney is clearly not hurting for sci-fi content. At this point, it appears that The Black Hole just doesn't really have a home among all the other content. Jon Spaihts is certainly right that The Black Hole is a much darker film than we're used to seeing from Disney and while they studio doesn't have a problem producing a variety of different kinds of content from their various different subsidiaries, the Disney name is usually a little brighter. There have always been exceptions to that, so we don't know the film's darkness is the only reason the remake hasn't moved forward, but it certainly may be one of the reasons.
It's clear that Jon Spaihts thinks his script for a Black Hole remake is solid and we'd certainly love to see it on the screen eventually and judge for ourselves. With so many other remakes, however, it's difficult to figure when Disney would find the time to produce it. Would you go see The Black Hole if they remade it? Have you seen the original? Let us know in the comments.
