Tom Cruise Signs up for Del Toro Horror

Tom Cruise has signed up to star in Guillermo Del Toro's next big screen adaptation of the HP Lovecraft si-fi novel At The Mountains of Madness.

He's set to play geology professor William Dyer, a scientist-explorer who discovered a dangerous secret hidden in the ruins of an alien city during an expedition to the Antarctic.

Producer Don Murphy told io9 that not only is Cruise attached to star, but filming is scheduled to begin in June.

He also added that "the script is very close to the H.P. Lovecraft source material" which was originally serialized in the 1936 issues of Astounding Stories.

Update: At the Mountains of Madness has been put in limbo. The New Yorker's news desk ran a melancholy addendum to its Feb. 7 feature about director Guillermo del Toro and his attempts to make a $150 million live-action film of H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness." Apparently Universal refused to greenlight the project due to del Toro's insistence that it be released with an "R" rating rather than a "PG-13."


Del Toro's e-mail to New Yorker writer Daniel Zalewski was two sentences long: "'Madness' has gone dark. The ‘R’ did us in."....Got to love the moral police.