Overview
It’s been a good start to the year for local film buffs. Funny men Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi successfully managed to raise over $440,000 for the stateside release of their vampire mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows, and now two Auckland film makers have caught the eye of some Hollywood big wigs with their low-budget horror-comedy.
The homegrown film Housebound tells the story of a young woman who is sentenced to house arrest in a potentially haunted house with her small-town-minded mother and stepfather. After being given a $250K leg up from the NZ Film Commission, the film was released last year to glowing reviews. It also managed to pick up a series of awards in Edinburgh, Strasbourg and Switzerland in the process.
Although the movie was given a small theatrical release in the US, big budget film studio New Line Cinema has now picked up the rights to remake the film. The deal came after Lord of the Rings director and fellow horror enthusiast Peter Jackson pointed writer/director Gerard Johnstone in the right direction.
Johnstone and fellow Housebound producer Luke Sharpe will oversee production of the remake alongside New Line execs Dave Neustadter and Walter Hamada, but will handover the filmmaking reins to someone else. A search for a writer to adapt the movie is also underway.
Sharpe told the NZ Herald, “It's amazing to find ourselves in this position,” "For the format to now be picked up by a major Hollywood studio with such great pedigree in the genre, is just incredible."
