As somebody who covers the movie industry and the theme park industry professionally, I love it when my two passions come together. When movies based on theme park attractions happen, I am always going to be interested. So when it was announced several years ago that Scarlett Johansson was going to produce and star in a movie version of Disney World's Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, I was on board. But four years after the initial announcement, nothing has materialized.
Following the announcement of the film, we would hear nothing for two years. Following the end of the WGA Writers’ Strike, Johansson would reveal work was getting back underway, but then everything fell silent again. By this point, I had just assumed the entire project had fallen into another dimension to be lost in the actual Twilight Zone. However, speaking with EW recently, the actress and producer seems confident the movie will happen as she promises that it's “taking shape,” though she admits there have been difficulties, explaining:
That's part of the mystery of the ride. It's been a fun project to work on, because it's a blue sky project. It has also proved to be a hard nut to crack. But, we'll crack the case of it. It's taking shape!
If the movie really wasn't in active development, Johansson would probably just say so, so it would seem likely that we can take her enthusiasm at face value. Also, bonus points to Scarlett for calling it a "blue sky" project, a term used at Walt Disney Imagineering to describe the early stages of development on brand-new attractions.
I’ll be the first to admit that not all the movies based on theme park rides have been great, but I do think there’s a lot of potential in them. This is why I’m as excited as anybody to discover that the Tower of Terror movie is still an active concern. As far as why the movie has taken this long, Johansson says it’s been difficult because while the Tower of Terror has a story, it doesn’t have much of one. She explained…
It's a hard nut to crack. Harder than you think, because the ride itself, there's some lore to it, but it's... I don't want to say thin, but it is, kind of!
To be fair, she’s not wrong. The story is kind of thin, as basically all theme park attraction stories are. It introduces the existence of the Hollywood Tower Hotel, a glamorous hotel where famous people visited in 1939. On a stormy night, lightning strikes an elevator containing five people, causing an entire portion of the hotel to disappear and enter…The Twilight Zone.
That’s not a lot to work with, at the same time, it also leaves the door open for screenwriters to be fairly creative with whatever story they want to tell. The best movies based on theme park rides, like Pirates of the Caribbean and Jungle Cruise, have ultimately taken the setting of the attraction and used it as a location to tell a completely original story.
The issue here may honestly be that the Tower of Terror has too much story. There are more specific details here, including specific characters the movie should probably have if it’s going to try and be as accurate as possible to the ride. Then you have to put a story together that uses those characters and the setting compellingly.
Somebody thought making a Tower of Terror movie was a good idea for the project to go into development in the first place, and if Scarlett Johansson and her team are still working on it, they must think there’s some potential. At the same time, it doesn’t sound like the story is particularly close to being done, so we may still have a long time to wait before it comes.
Despite mixed results, Disney has continued to invest in this particular area, though all of the projects seem to be in holding patterns. There are multiple upcoming movies based on Disney rides. Margot Robbie's production company is behind a movie based on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. A Space Mountain movie has also been in development hell, moving through multiple writing teams. Then, of course, you have the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie that we keep being told will happen, and a Jungle Cruise sequel that has been announced but still sits on Dwayne Johnson's backlog.
So, it's hard to know when these projects will actually come out. However, at least we now know that Tower of Terror hasn't been dropped.
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