It was just a month ago that we were raising our eyebrows in curiosity at Blumhouse and Paramount’s pitch for new horror movie Molepeople, with LaKeith Stanfield set to star in a film about a man who makes what sounds to us like the pretty obvious mistake of descending into the abandoned tunnels of New York, only to encounter a “twisted society lurking beneath the streets.” (We might refer to such a setting as “chock full of C.H.U.D.s,” but we have to assume the C.H.U.D. rights are an absolute bear to secure in 2026.) But not every dream of watching Stanfield freak out in the face of humanoid underground dwellers (possibly cannibalistic) can come to fruition, apparently, as Variety reports that the Sorry To Bother You star has ditched out on the project.
The issue, apparently, was that ol’ bugbear “scheduling problems,” which also forced director Rob Savage—fresh off his not-very-good Jessica Chastain vehicle Other Mommy—to abandon these subterranean stories. Which does lead to the intriguing news (also per Variety) that Ben Wheatley has signed on to take over the movie, making what we can only assume will be “A High-Rise, but pointing in the opposite direction.”
Admittedly, we weren’t big fans of Wheatley’s last movie, Normal, the latest symptom of this chronic disease that Hollywood’s apparently developed where it wants to turn Bob Odenkirk into a sexagenarian action star. But Wheatley’s had enough successes with his relatively short career, filling early films like High-Rise and A Field In England with strange and brain-burning tensions, that we can imagine him doing well with this latest spelunker story. (That, or he’ll sort of settle into the career trajectory implied by his recent direction of movies like Normal and The Meg 2, i.e., a functional journeyman doing largely anonymous work and kind of coasting on the goodwill of his early wins. Could go either way!)
Molepeople is being made from a script written by Nathan Elston, who is somehow both the author of landmark Succession final-season episode “Connor’s Wedding” and Other Mommy; we’re guessing this particular script hews closer to the latter than the former. (Although we’d be happy to be wrong; sign us up for a heartbreaking scene of deeply damaged molepeople talking to their unconscious moleperson father while he dies, just out of sight, on a mole-airplane floor.)
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