Why James Gunn's Remake Of A Horror Cult Classic Was Cancelled

In the late, great Larry Cohen's 1974 horror classic "It's Alive," Frank (John P. Ryan) and his wife Lenore (Sharon Farrell) have just had their second child ... and it's a monster. Their baby was born with fangs and claws, as well as increased dexterity and an unhuman lust for violence. As soon as the baby is born, it kills the nurses and scurries away through a skylight. The bulk of the film is a gruesome manhunt ... er, babyhunt ... wherein Frank and the local police track the killer baby through the streets, through a school, and eventually into the sewers. The baby murders people at each stop. It's posited along the way that the baby was mutated by the birth control pills still in Lenore's system when she was pregnant, and that the pharmaceutical company that made the pills is liable for any damage the mutant baby does. The Big Pharma character is more determined than anyone to kill the monster child. 

"It's Alive" was a hit, making over $7 million on a $500,000 budget. It has since moved favorably into horror-fan and cult circles, where it is widely beloved by weirdos and gorehounds. The killer baby concept was repeated in Cohen's 1978 sequel "It Lives Again," and the 1987 follow-up "It's Alive III: Island of the Alive." Larry Cohen was a master at way-way-out-there exploitation movies that were strange even compared to those of his contemporaries. Cohen's stories were always notable and ambitious and striking original. "It's Alive" was eventually remade in 2009 as a straight-to-video release, directed by Joe Rusnak ("The Thirteenth Floor") and starring Bijou Phillips in the Sharon Farrell role. 

It seems that James Gunn, however, was once interested in doing that remake. Back in 2017, two years before his death, Cohen talked to IndieWire about his prolific horror output, and he casually dropped the bomb that Gunn, currently a high-profile stalwart of superhero cinema, tried to buy the remake rights to "It's Alive" years earlier. 

Gunn, to remind readers, is currently the chief muckety-muck over at DC Studios, and he is overseeing/writing/directing a large spate of big-budget movies intended to launch a brand-new superhero cinematic universe. Gunn, however, used to be a punk. He started his career writing goopy horror/comedies and superhero satires; better than any of his "Guardians of the Galaxy" movies is Lloyd Kaufman's 1996 Shakespeare trash epic "Tromeo & Juliet." Gunn also penned the remake of "Dawn of the Dead" and the not-good-but-well-remembered "Scooby-Doo" movies from the early-'00s. It's unusual that his stock-in-trade should be superheroes, as he pretty much dismantled the very concept of superheroes in films like "The Specials" and "Super." 

Cohen doesn't say what Gunn intended to do with "It's Alive," but he does recall that Gunn couldn't afford the remake rights to his movie. He said briefly: 

"James Gunn is a fan and a friend. He wanted to make a remake of 'It's Alive,' actually, but he couldn't raise enough money to buy the rights. I'm sorry today I didn't give them to him. But he's beyond that now." 

Cohen's statement implies that Gunn wanted to remake "It's Alive" before he found massive success with "Guardians of the Galaxy" in 2014. The actual timeline of Gunn's potential "It's Alive" film is unclear, however, and no script has been revealed. 

It was, of course, only one of Gunn's many, many unrealized projects. Over his career, Gunn has written — or was merely asked to write — several pop culture adaptations that never made it to fruition. Gunn was asked to write a script for a Silver Surfer movie way back in 1999, about the same time he was working on a "Spy vs. Spy" movie, and a horror version of "Gilligan's Island." Gunn had a hand in scripting a Plastic Man movie, a "Creature from the Black Lagoon" remake, and a reboot of "Starsky & Hutch." 

It seems that the remake of "It's Alive" is just one that Gunn had to throw on the pile.