Disney Venturing Back to the 'Black Hole'

I have pretty vivid memories of stumbling across a copy of Black Hole in a Hollywood Video when I was a young impressionable lad, seeing the Disney logo and expecting the movie to be an exciting adventure for the whole family. Instead, I got a nasty robot named Maximilian rampaging through people's epidermis (and later going to Hell...I think). Let's just say the movie left an impression.

Well, looks like it left an impression on people with big offices at Disney, because The Hollywood Reporter is, er, reporting that Black Hole is getting pushed through the remake machine courtesy of Joseph Kosinski and Sean Bailey, the director and producer of the still-a-year-away-from-release Tron: Legacy. For those of you unfamiliar with the original, I'll let the original article do the heavy lifting:

"The original followed a group of space explorers aboard the USS Palomino who come across a lost ship, the USS Cygnus, hovering outside a black hole. Inside the Cygnus, the explorers meet a scientist, commanding an army of faceless robots, who explains his crew deserted him as he planned to go through the black hole. The explorers soon discover that the robots are the remnants of the former crew and that the scientist has no intention of letting them leave."

The article also notes that Black Hole was, at the time, Disney's most expensive film and made the studio a major player in the visual effects game, allowing other, more famous films such as Tron to get made. How much the remake will stick to the original plot is unknown right now, but we are being promised that the remake will "[ground] the story in the science of a black hole, much more so than in the original." The return of that pure-nightmare-sauce robot Maximilian is also promised.

So, what does all of this mean? It means that Disney has extraordinary confidence in Tron: Legacy to hand off another potentially huge property to Kosinkski. Everything I've seen from Tron: Legacy suggests a visually stunning film; if he can nail the story, he'll be someone to keep our collective eye on.

The original Black Hole is not and will never be a great movie, but it has a GREAT premise and in the right hands, it could be a really effective movie. This is the type of movie that I have no problem being remade.