James Wan Still Developing H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Call of Cthulhu’

After Guillermo del Toro spent years trying to get his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness off the ground, James Wan was announced to be taking a stab at the author’s famous Call of Cthulhu.

Best known for co-creating the Insidious, Saw, and The Conjuring franchises, Wan was tapped in 2023 to work on an adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft horror short, which he has quietly been developing for the better part of five years.

Little has emerged about the project since, aside from Wan’s April 2024 comment that the script would likely be a “hard sell.”

Now, in a new interview promoting the Lee Cronin-directed The Mummy, which he produced with Blumhouse for Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema, he reveals that he’s still “chipping away” at the project and hopes to overcome several hurdles.

The genre vet confirmed to ScreenRant that the film is still in development, and is one “I’ve been wanting to do for a while,” but is currently facing the hurdle that Lovecraftian films “are not cheap movies.” Further admitting them to be “very hard to try and get them off the ground,” Wan concluded by assuring, “I’m just going to keep chipping away at it.”

The story follows Francis Thurston as he investigates a cult that worships the ancient monster Cthulhu.

H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu has inspired numerous video game adaptations, most notably the atmospheric investigative horror title Call of Cthulhu (2018), which blends psychological terror with detective gameplay.