Stay away from the water!

The Gillman is coming back to theaters, and James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring) is in talks to direct a remake of the 1954 Universal Horror classic The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Wan is already on board to produce the film under his Atomic Monster banner with Atomic Monster’s Michael Clear and Judson Scott serving as executive producers. Jay Polidoro will oversee the project for Universal, who commissioned the remake.

Wan is reportedly developing a grounded and modernized retelling that will allow him to return to his horror roots, while still honoring the original classic. The Creature From the Black Lagoon has been a high priority for Universal since the studio revamped its monster movies strategy in 2019 with an eye to focusing on filmmaker-driven projects. A search is on for someone to pen the screenplay.

While no official casting decisions have been made, according to one source, Scarlett Johansson could star, possibly as the object of the Creature’s desire.

This is not the first attempt to remake the 70-year-old film; Guillermo del Toro and others have tried to reboot the iconic black-and-white film about a group of scientists who encounter a prehistoric monster in the Amazonian waters. None have gotten off the ground thus far, but del Toro did direct the similarly-themed The Shape of Water in 2017, which won four Academy Awards including Best Picture.

This is not Universal’s first attempt to remake films from their monster catalog dating back to the 1930s; the studio has put out remakes of The Mummy in 2017 with Tom Cruise and The Invisible Man in 2020 with Elisabeth Moss, as well as the original Renfield in 2023, about the bug-eating servant from the Dracula films. Of these films, only The Invisible Man overperformed at the box office.

The failure of The Mummy at the box office put the kibosh on Universal’s planned ‘Dark Universe’ series of interconnected films but the studio is still forging ahead with standalone films using the famous monsters. In addition to Creature, a remake of The Wolf Man (called simply Wolf Man) featuring Christopher Abbott is currently in the works for the studio and schedule to be released in January of 2025.