Jon Turtletaub’s The Meg brought one of the most massive sharks theaters have ever seen, but his PG-13 horror movie would have been a lot different if Eli Roth, who was once attached to direct, had stayed with the project.
Creature feature horror has seen its ups and downs, but one constant in the genre has been the tried-and-true shark movie. Ever since the days of Spielberg’s 1975 classic, Jaws, the apex predator of the seas has dared audiences to go back into the water. Turtletaub’s vision for The Meg, which is based off the book Meg: A Novel Of Deep Terror by Steve Alten, took on a more science-fiction/action lean that, coupled with its PG-13 rating, didn’t deliver the blood and scares that most audiences would expect from a film about a 75 foot, prehistoric shark. Even so, the film’s $130 million budget was decimated by its $530.2 million gross at the box office, which, in true summer blockbuster style, marked it as a success despite it not being what horror fans - or even star Jason Statham - wanted.
The Meg, which follows a team of scientists who end up encountering a megalodon, a deep-sea creature that existed anywhere from 3.6 million to 23 million years ago, could have been a very different movie in another director’s hands.
Eli Roth’s Direction Of The Meg Could Have Brought Shark Horror Back In A Big Way
Eli Roth, who has made an incredible career for himself amongst horror fans with hit films like Hostel and Cabin Fever, was attached to direct The Meg at one point. The film first received buzz from New Line Cinema, who had the project back in 2005, and had Guillermo Del Toro attached as a producer, with Jan de Bont (Cujo, Speed) directing. The film’s initial $75 million budget was too much for New Line, who decided to cancel it, leaving it open for another studio to pick up. From there, Warner Bros became attached in 2015 after the rights to the movie reverted back to Steve Alten. Dean Georgaris wrote the brand new script for The Meg and, in June 2015, Eli Roth was announced as the director.
Roth dropped out of the project, citing creative differences as the reason, which could have been meant Warner Bros wanted something a bit more friendly for a summer blockbuster than Roth might want to bring to the table. Roth is not only a fantastic director of horror films, but he’s a huge fan of the genre, as proven by his series on AMC, Eli Roth’s History of Horror, which got renewed for a second season. Someone with that much love for the genre likely wouldn’t be able to make a killer shark movie without capitalizing on the sheer damage that could be done by a creature of that size to many unsuspecting individuals.
Recently, creature features have shifted back to pure horror roots rather than capitalizing on ridiculous levels of schlocky comedy, as was done in SyFy’s series, Sharknado, and a slew of other B-horror movies. Alexandre Aja, who directed sleek, viscerally horrifying films like High Tension and the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes, took on alligators in 2019’s Crawl. This ended up being a highlight for fans and a pleasant surprise, likely because they were expecting something more along the lines of The Meg and got grisly creature violence instead.
Next: Killer Shark Movies: How The Genre Changed Over Time
