Ryan Gosling will no longer play the werewolf in Blumhouse’s upcoming Wolf Man, but between the time he came and went, co-writer and director Leigh Whannell says nothing has changed about the actual story. Whannel was attached to the movie in 2020, co-writing along with his wife Corbett Tuck, until he had to back out in 2021 due to scheduling issues. That’s when Gosling suggested Derek Cianfrance, who had directed the star previously in Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines. Cianfrance was going to rewrite it and direct, but when the movie hadn’t moved forward by the end of 2023, Gosling and Cianfrance walked away, and Blumhouse brought Whannell back to get the movie on track.
Speaking with ComicBook at New York Comic Con, Whannell told us that he and Tuck had never backed down from their original story, and really only drilled a little deeper into the concept for the movie, which is due in theaters next year.
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“I ended up sort of parting ways for a while and coming back, and then I just went straight back to what I was originally doing,” Whannell said. “My wife and I actually co-wrote the film, so we just stayed the course. We went back to our script, and it was always just this one concept, really drilling down.”
The movie has been in development since around 2014, when it was originally part of a plan to make a shared universe out of Universal monsters films. The failure of The Mummy with Tom Cruise cooled some of Universal’s interest, but Whannell revitalized the idea with the success of The Invisible Man in 2020.
Blumhouse, of course, has been one of the most consistently successful studios in the horror space for about a decade now, creating a variety of hits for Universal and Warner Bros. Like fellow cult-favorite studio A24, Blumhouse has just launched a bespoke online storefront — the Blumhouse Shop — where fans can get not only t-shirts and hoodies, but also a variety of exclusive merch based on properties produced by Blumhouse.
Wolf Man is currently set to hit theaters on January 17, 2025. Christopher Abbott (Poor Things, It Comes at Night) stars as Blake, a San Francisco husband and father, who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his own father vanishes and is presumed dead. With his marriage to his high-powered wife, Charlotte (Emmy winner Julia Garner; Ozark, Inventing Anna), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger (Matlida Firth; Hullraisers, Coma).