After combining the egos of Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer created the unstable asshole-unstable asshole hybrid that was 1996’s The Island Of Dr. Moreau, an arrogant Warner Bros. is ready to experiment again with H.G. Wells’ building blocks of science-fiction life. Deadline reports that Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way is developing another take on the 1896 novel that’s been mutated into movies three times already: as 1932’s Charles Laughton/Bela Lugosi-starring Island Of Lost Souls, as a 1977 version with Burt Lancaster, and as that movie where Marlon Brando put sunscreen on his face and a bucket on his head, played a piano duet with a tiny Homunculus Brando, and dispassionately relayed dialogue (and the occasional police radio transmission) fed to him through an earpiece. The latest version will continue its questionable gene-splicing, mashing up Wells’ work with the writers of Netflix’s equally fascinatingly awful Hemlock Grove with Appian’s new mission to create “a sci-fi film with a topical ecological message”—such as “Don’t make hyena-swines, they just poop in the river.”
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