Check out The Thing (2011) storyboards by Rob McCallum!
The 2011 prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing, had major reshoots.
Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr. claimed that the reshoots of the film included an entirely different ending. He called the original cut as the "Pilot Version" and the new cut the "Tetris Version".
Find out why it was changed and what the original ending looked like in storyboards by Rob McCallum.
McCallum is a professional storyboard and concept artist who's worked on Hollywood films like Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), 16 Blocks (2006) and Total Recall (2012)
Check out the rest of the pictures after the jump (click to enlarge).
Here's a description of the scene by the director from his Facebook page,
"In the Pilot version Kate walks in this room and sees a dead Pilot hanging. He was the last Pilot alive and Kate sees that he killed himself because his air pipe was cut (basically Colin in space).
"Of course it doesn’t, it climbs out and freezes himself. So back to Kate. She sees the dead Pilot and [that] Sander, [who] now has taken the form of the Pilot (he has the genetics because of his spaceship slaughter fest 100.000 years before), has started up the ship.
"Sander attacks Kate in Pilot form and corners Kate, who pulls her last grenade and threatens to blow them both up. That moment Carter runs in and sees what she is doing and blows up the Sander Thing just to convince Kate that he is human (He basically has no choice because he if fries Kate with his flamethrower everybody would blow up).
"[A] little complicated but we filmed this. What you see on the picture [below] is Pilot Sander Thing being burned by Carter (ref for CGI). Studio didn’t like this (too complicated and till some degree they were right) so we had to lose the backstory and replaced the Pilot with the Tetris.
"They thought that the Pilot wasn’t scary enough, so we created the Sander Thing the last minute (which shows unfortunately).”
See more of Rob McCallum's work at http://www.mccallumart.com
Click on the links if you want to see more of Rob McCallum's work and The Thing on my blog.
What do you think of the storyboards?Did you like the remake?
Official Thing Synopsis
"Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of awesome beauty. It is also home to an isolated outpost where a discovery full of scientific possibility becomes a mission of survival when an alien is unearthed by a crew of international scientists. The shape-shifting creature, accidentally unleashed at this marooned colony, has the ability to turn itself into a perfect replica of any living being. It can look just like you or me, but inside, it remains inhuman. In the thriller THE THING, paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet. Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up. When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish."
Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen
Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Eric Christian Olsen
Cinematography by Michel Abramowicz
Production Design by Sean Haworth
Official Site: http://www.thethingmovie.net/
Release date: October 14, 2011
@ Copyright 2011 Strike Entertainment, Morgan Creek Productions, Universal Pictures. All rights reserved
About the Author
Not sure the original ending would've helped much. The story was still too much like the original. I'm just a die-hard fan of Carpenter's The Thing.
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