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Ronald D. Moore's Script for The Thing Prequel is Finished!

by Kevin Powers
March 19, 2009
Source: IGN

John Carpenter's original The Thing first scared audiences back in 1982, and now 27 years later an extension of that story has finally been written and is being readied for the big screen. "Battlestar Galactica" scribe Ronald D. Moore (who was announced back in January) told IGN this week, "I did my drafts. They were happy. They have a director and, you know, it's the feature world and I'm not the key player so we just wait and see if they're going to greenlight it or not. I'm not the chef. I'm the short-order cook who comes in and does my thing and we'll see what they want to serve." Well put. Now we just hope it's a good script.

Thankfully, Moore's script isn't the oh-so-reflexive reboot to the classic tales of old, but actually a prequel to original story. Moore said: "It's really a companion piece to the Carpenter version. We're telling the story of the Norwegian camp that found the Thing before the Kurt Russell group did, so it's very buried in the continuity [and] it's supposed to be the other story that you saw part of. So we didn't want to reinvent it. It was really much the opposite. We really wanted to have this flow seamlessly into what he did."

The director for this prequel is reportedly newcomer Matthijs van Heijningen, who is also supposed to helm the upcoming Army of the Dead, for which Zack Snyder is producing. This is definitely the kind of material that pulls me in. It’s so nice to see a project tread its own path as opposed to reboot what we're already so familiar with. The question next is how well Moore handles pulling back the story, and what the studio thinks of his first draft of the screenplay. With so many "Battlestar" episodes under his belt, Moore certainly seems to have the right mindset for the job. I'm definitely excited to see how this all pans out! Are you?

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From around the web:

moldybread

I loved Carpenter's The Thing....I simply dont see what is going to be different about this prequel...the "Thing" whacking out a bunch of scientists? its already been done... oh, I forgot, they're Norwegian...so, do Norwegian scientists die differently than American scientists? just seems a waste of time & money....jmo...
rob

I'm all for it, for the simple fact that they're trying to create something new and original to work with one of the best horror movies ever made. The Thing reboot would never fly but expanding on what was a great story is respectable. It does suck that we already know that no one from the camp will survive besides the infected dog but I was always curious about what the spaceship looked like and exactly what they found that was frozen after trying to crawl away from the wreckage. What the fuck did the original alien look like??? If you guys haven't seen John Carpenter's version then you're all seriously missing out on the best sci-fi horror movie ever made.
DarkRaven18599

I agree with rob in that it's going to be a bit of a let down to already know how the story is going to end before even sitting down for the trailers. While a fan of the first film might find it would be cool to have a little more background info on the alien "thing", that may not really be the best for anyone who hasn't seen the Carpenter film before. Part of the horror and suspense behind the remake Carpenter did was that you had no idea what the hell the "thing" was or what it could do. Guess we'll have to see how this plays out.
RPH

I just hope CGI carries over the same fear the creature instilled in me as in the Carpenter version.... Anyone ever see the really old one from like the 50's?
http://www.dropcards.com/oct8pus Google The Oct8pus

#1 reason the new "Thing" is going to suck: GCI If they used puppets and meat and rubber and real fake blood, and weird camera tricks like they did in the Carpenter version, then maybe we'd have a decent "prequel", but the creepy thing about the "Thing" is that it all looked so real in such a weird way...and CGI can't pull that off....
Fisherr

I would love to see the prequel and i hope it meets the potential of the first movie, although it don't think it will be scary as the first because as technology advances horror movies becomes more like a joke.
MarkSD

I keep asking this question and i still haven't found a positive example... HAS THERE EVER BEEN A GOOD PREQUEL??? No honestly think about it? There are sequels that can improve upon the originals, but there has never been a prequel better than the original film in the history of cinema. No, not a reinvention (before anyone mentions Batman Begins) and not a sequel with flashbacks set before the original (Godfather Part II), and not a separate movie concerning younger versions of characters from totally unrelated movies (such as Young Victoria would be to Mrs Brown, if you see what i mean) Please i'd love to hear any suggestions for a prequel that was superior to it's original film. Because although i've got high hopes for The Hobbit, at the moment it looks like prequels are just Hollywood's way of recycling even more of it's plotlines, and making more movies out of it's great characters now even the dead ones.
well

I think fistshowing.net should be renamed secondshowing.net, because blogging about hollywood seems nothing else than covering sequels and remakes, tssss...
Andy from norway

Since it´s going to be about the norwegian camp, i hope they put some norwegians actor in it. Not all english speaking actors that try to speak norwegian. Like the scene in the first movie there the guy is trying to shot the dog. It sounded hilarious.
Jim

The only thing that gives me hope that this won't be a cookie cutter "lets redo what was done in the last movie" is that Ronald D. Moore wrote the screen play. He took Battlestar in a completely different (and awesome) direction using the source material from the 1970's show. I would bet he would do the same with "The Thing". Plus, everyone needs to remember that John Carpenters The Thing is a remake of the movie "The Thing From Another World". Did anyone else noticed that the time spans between "The Thing From Another World" (1951) and "John Carpenters The Thing" (1982) and now "The Thing Prequel" is pretty consistent? 31 years between the first and 2nd movies and 28 years between the 2nd and 3rd if the prequel releases in 2010. I guess you have to give Carpenter credit for making a movie that stands the test of time.
Turpin

I've had nightmares about The Thing that would provide for stories for at least a couple of sequels and would be worth doing in my opinion. They certainly woke me up and kept me awake as I consciously remembered them while staring out at the darkness of my bedroom. As for those who say we know what happened to everyone in The Norwegian camp, are you serious? We'll actually get to see what the aliens in the spacecraft looked like. We'll see The Thing in the first form it took. There's no telling at this point how many manifestations of The Thing simply wandered away in some direction away from the camps. And it's my hope that the end of this prequel will show us the fates of Childs and MacReady. Do they get rescued? Do they get assimilated? Freeze to death? Does one of them attempt to assimilate the other? With The Thing, nothing is certain. And also, what do you think will happen when a rescue team discovers the UFO, (which is of course inevitable)? Don't you think there might yet be frozen remains/organisms onboard? What if the government is acually able to keep samples of The Thing frozen and contained? There could be storylines that reach into the distant future based on these possibilities.
Sharath ( from INDIA)

What a movie "John Carpenter" has made...Really has stood the test of time...I have seen it 'n' number of times and my appetite never ends....i was waiting all these days for a Sequel to the 1982 movie...waiting to see what happens to Macready and Childs at the end...and here it goes...A prequel ..instead of a sequel. No issues as long as it gives the complete creature information , since we dont know how it really looks like in its original version...(I remember a movie LEVIATHAN..where you cant make anything out the creature...just a bunch of bodies hanging around ..which is the shape of the creature..dreadful!!). I hope they show the Creature properly in the Prequel atleast. This Prequel should also focus on what happens to macready and Childs at the end of the 1982 movie...(the ideal ending of this movie would be the Helicopter scene chasing the dog....which is the first scene of the 1982 movie)....but we should know what happened to them.....may be a fastforwarding to the end of the 1982 movie..that will make it more interesting...whether they were affected and if so who was affected... Jsut cant wait for this Prequel to get released.... Kudos..John Carpenter...for making THE best Sci-Fi Horror movie ever ..next to the Alien Series....
Turpin

Alien movies? There were only two in my opinion. About the original form it was found in, I don't think the form it was in in that block of ice wouldn't have been its original form. I don't think it has what you could call an "original form". I'd guess what they found in the block of ice was probably the form of one of the aliens that owned the spacecraft originally.
Turpin

Correcting my post, "I don't think the alien in the block of ice would have been The Thing's original form. Its original form is irrelevant in my opinion. It abandoned its "original form" at a previous point in its evolution. It has been shape shifting for so long that its "form" is always a conglomeration of its favorite recent conquests. It always wants more. It wants to climb the chain of evolution as a parasite on the shoulders of other life forms rather than getting there on its own. Taking the best of what other organisms have achieved, assimilating them, and making them its own. Sound familiar? "We are The Thing; resistance is futile"
Turpin

I know I've posted too much, but I have to say this: Please, if anyone working on The Thing movie or future projects based on The Thing, please don't turn concept of The Thing into something as conscious and relatable as The Borg from Star Trek. The Thing should remain a monster always. We the audience must never be able to "get into its head" and figure out what it's thinking. The Borg collective may be an interesting, somewhat frightening idea for Star Trek, similar in some ways to The Thing, but they still tend to be humanoids, and humanoids think more or less alike. The Thing has a thinking pattern all its own that even at the end of John Carpenter's movie, we couldn't completely figure out. IF THE THING IS TO REMAIN TRULY TERRIFYING, WE MUST NEVER UNDERSTAND HOW IT THINKS. Maybe the caps were too much? No, I don't think so; in fact, underline "never". Once you understand how something thinks, it becomes not a monster, but simply an animal, an organism, no longer as scary. That's what, among other factors, killed the Alien movies in my opinion. We started to "figure the aliens out". We saw how mortal the aliens were, that all it takes is a good few gun shots in the head area to kill one, and by the end of the second movie, we no longer felt that threatened by the individual aliens themselves. By the end of the third one, man's own willingness to use The Aliens as weapons seemed scarier and darker than the aliens themselves. On the other hand, in John Carpenter's movie, we find that The Thing can't be killed conventionally. Even after soaking The Thing in flammable fluids and burning them to a crisp, one has to wonder how much of it escaped unseen behind the flames, or perhaps by reshaping and digging themselves down away from the fire. At the end, even after all the camp was destroyed, you can't help but get the sense that there are still possibly hundreds of small Things running around, broken off at various times between assimilations. And even a small one can latch onto someone and inject a lot of itself into a person's arm or leg, enough to eventually take that person over. That's why The Thing is the ultimate biological terror and I doubt that its concept will be topped in my lifetime.
wlfred brimley

the only substantial assimilation the thing will have is the funky bazunky effects from the new school cgi clown department.false reporting and misdirection on their part would confirm sequel in my opinion.there are many plausible explanations about predecessors and origins that would confirm this guesstimation.drop that off at the bank bzank.
Fed Up With Hollywood

This is going to blow...I read another report stating that the director wanted to make McReady's brother the main character (at the Norwegian camp...wha?!?). Also, as others have stated, trying to do the Thing in CGI is going to suck. The only way I could see this as any kind of 'ok' is if they made it a sequal where the bodies were recovered and brought back to civilization, the Thing gets free and wreaks havoc on the population at large. But then that would probably suck too. Just leave the classics alone! I say we take off and nuke Hollywood from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
stu

I'm late to the discussion here, but for those who say we already know the ending of the Norwegian scientists, that's not entirely true. Yes, we only see the two Norwegians in the helicopter at the start of The Thing, but they're already in flight at the time. There could still be one or more back at the camp trying to tie up loose ends there, and in the interim between the chopper leaving and the Americans coming back, they could have left camp as well (is it possible there are any other shelters to be found beside the Norwegian and American compounds?).
John

This is gonna suck... royally. Ronald D Moore is that hack that totally made a crapfest of the new Battlestar Galactica SyFy tv show. What a bore that was.
Uyen

Ronald Moore is a stupid hack and a douchebag. People think he's smart but he's just an average schmuck. Several of his other movie scripts had to be rewritten because they were garbage. If I were a producer or exec, I wouldn't touch any of Moore's scripts with a ten-foot pole.