It’s been 9 years since Eli Roth burst onto the film scene with Cabin Fever, a low-budget horror movie many fans considered a return to the genre. It’s been 5 years since his last movie, Hostel: Part II, but he hasn’t been sitting around doing nothing. As well as starring in Inglorious Basterds, he directed the film-within-the-film, Nation’s Pride, and helped produce The Last Exorcism, among other projects. Now, Roth’s looking to get back into the feature directing game with his science fiction apocalypse project, Endangered Species.
indieWIRE reports the film will be in the style of Transformers or Cloverfield, only the source of the destruction that rains down on Earth, “is not aliens or robots or a virus,” Roth says,. “It’s a little more grounded. But when people hear it they are going to be like ‘That is going to be insane!’.” Roth estimates the budget needed will be between $40-60 million.
Said Roth at AICN last year:
“[‘Endangered Species’] is a tricky film; it’s going to be an expensive movie, so any changes I want to make, I want to make them on the page as opposed to shooting and then re-shooting or fixing them in editing. It’s not like I can just shoot and shoot and figure it out later; this thing has to be mapped out very, very carefully.”
Meanwhile, Roth is keeping busy producing Aftershock, a horror/thriller he co-wrote with Nicolás López and Guillermo Amoedo. The film will be directed by López and set in the aftermath of the Feb. 27, 2010 earthquake in Chile. Says Roth:
“That (the idea) came from him (Lopez) describing to me what the hours were like immediately following the earthquake. Everybody is on Facebook, everybody is on Twitter, everything is hi-tech. Then, within seconds, it’s like the Stone Age. There’s no electricity, no phones. There are fires. Criminals are out of the prisons and there are no police. You don’t know what the hell is going on.”
Aftershock begins shooting this Fall, with Endangered Species (hopefully) going into production sometime in the not-too-distant future.
Roth may have some trouble getting the money together for Endangered Species, though, since Hostel: Part II didn’t exactly break box office records. The director blames piracy, claiming the 2 million illegal downloads of the film ruined its box office take. He’s come up with a solution he thinks will solve the piracy problem for good: raise ticket prices so the cost will include a digital download of the movie. He explains:
“30 days from the film’s release, you get a link sent to your phone and you get a pristine copy. You’ll already have paid for it with your ticket. You won’t to have to save the ticket. The code will go into whatever your account is with that movie theatre chain.”
I would absolutely be on board with this plan, but I can’t imagine studios lining up to gouge their DVD sales and rental profits just to keep the pirates at bay.
What do you think of Roth’s anti-piracy plan?