It has been ten years since Disney first announced they were making a big screen film based on the attraction Tower of Terror. It’s been four years since Scarlett Johansson was revealed to be attached as producer and star, and it’s been a year and a half since Johansson’s last update on the film’s progress.
The actress recently opened up about how it’s all coming along in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, where she said that while she can’t say much about the long-gestating movie, she and Disney are hard at work in adapting the haunted hotel-themed narrative from the 1994 Twilight Zone-centric drop tower attraction at Disney’s Hollywood Studios park in Orlando, Florida, and formerly at Disney’s California Adventure.
“It’s a hard nut to crack. Harder than you think, because the ride itself, there’s some lore to it, but it’s… I don’t want to say thin, but it is, kind of!” Johansson explains of the ride’s plot, which is set in the same universe as Rod Sterling’s iconic anthology TV series. It follows five souls who are transported to the Twilight Zone after boarding an elevator inside the Hollywood Tower Hotel that’s ultimately struck by lightning during a storm.
Johansson says that the ride’s narrative “doesn’t have so much to dig into” in terms of fleshing it out into a full Hollywood film, and thinks that kind of brief story works for a horror-tinged theme park attraction.
“That’s part of the mystery of the ride. It’s been a fun project to work on, because it’s a blue sky project,” explains Johansson. “It has also proved to be a hard nut to crack. But, we’ll crack the case of it. It’s taking shape!”
Stay tuned for more updates as the project moves forward.
