The Birds Remake Back-Burnered, Rosemary's Baby Re-Do Still Happening?

The notion of remaking Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was absurd from day one, and now the Platinum Dunes guys are suggesting they've started to see the light. "We lay ourselves out there and get annihilated out there online all day long," said producer Brad Fuller during a chat with journos on the set of A Nightmare on Elm St., "and [The Birds] just opens us up to a whole different level of annihilation." What's the conclusion? "...it doesn't feel like that's up next for us." More pecking around the corpse of The Birds and the (still?) planned Rosemary's Baby re-do after the jump.

There are a couple of problems with remaking The Birds. One is that it isn't just a Hitchcock picture, but one of his most striking pictures. It is a mainstream experiment in conceptual horror with what was at the time a way-out there sound mix and non-score. Furthermore, when trying to bring that to a Platinum Dunes level of amped-up-ness, apparently there's a wall to hit. Which is: birds don't really do much.

Brad Fuller: And the limitations that birds... What do they do? They peck and poke.

Andrew Form: And poop.

BF: Right, so there's not a lot of variety as to what can happen.

AF: You start with the s***ting and you build up to pecking and then they poke.

But remaking Roman Polanski's equally conceptual Rosemary's Baby may no longer prove to be as challenging, in part because Fuller and Form claim they've got a great script. When we see the film, it might not even have the overhead of sharing a title with Polanski's movie. As Fuller says:

...whoever's criticizing Rosemary's Baby hasn't read Scott Kosar's – we're calling it Rosemary's Baby, but we're not doing that movie. But they haven't read Scott Kosar's script, which is now called The Sacrifice. They haven't read that script, so when they can criticize something they know nothing about, that doesn't resonate with me.

So, wait, it will be called The Sacrifice, or the script is called that now and the movie will be called Rosemary's Baby? Confusion! Hopefully the former, because making a movie that isn't really a remake of the Polanski (itself an adaptation of Ira Levin's novel) but using the title would be the very definition of hubris. Of course, if you've been following along, this is truly confusing. Because last year Fuller told Collider that Rosemary's wasn't happening at all because they couldn't get the script to work.

[via Horror Squad and CHUD]