By MGM is going to reboot The Incredible Shrinking Man, one of the best sci-fi films of the 1950s. The movie was based on a novel by Richard Matheson, the 86-year-old genre maestro also responsible for I Am Legend and the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Matheson will collaborate with his son, Richard Matheson Jr., on the new film, which will maintain the tone and themes of the original while updating the story for modern times.
Describing the new film as an “existential action movie,” Matheson added:
My original story was a metaphor for how man’s place in the world was diminishing. That still holds today, where all these advancements that are going to save us will be our undoing.
I was maybe 10 years old when I first saw The Incredible Shrinking Man on TV, and I really enjoyed it. A tiny, helpless man fought a cat, dueled with a spider, and all the while lamented his fate; the size effects were good for their time too. I’m still charmed by the daring in the film, but now that I’m older, it’s the ending I find especially memorable — the perfect capper to a 1950s existential science fiction adventure.
[The Hollywood Reporter via The Film Stage]