New Teaser Trailer For Guillermo Del Toro’s The Strain

You may remember this found footage teaser for The Strain, a television program slated for release later this year based on a trilogy of vampire novels by Chuck Hogan.

If you don’t, let me bring you up to speed: the CDC is investigating a viral outbreak that seems suspiciously like vampirism. Newsflash: it is. Fortunately, none of the vampires seem to sparkle or mope. Instead, this 13 episode run will focus on Dr. Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll) and his medical investigators, as well as a former professor and survivor of the Holocaust named Abraham Setrakian (John Hurt!), who knows the real score about what is going down in New York City.

A new teaser for the show has been released. While it doesn’t really give us any more information about the program, it does at least narrow the release down to “Summer”. Thank god. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with myself once Dracula and The Vampire Diaries wrap for the season. Or Hulu shits the bed and I can’t watch reruns of Forever Knight, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, or Angel. Or my DVD player breaks and…well, you get my point. But, hey, it’s Del Toro. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. He must have learned something since Blade 2.

Check out the new teaser, after the jump.

Bastard In Charge: Guillermo del Toro Confirms Constantine To Lead Dark Universe

We appear to have our Internet and cable issues resolved here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives headquarters, after a long and exhausting weekend digging around in wiring… and we recovered our connectivity just in time for Wondercon to be over. Which means that there is a ton of news that even we need to catch up on, and, having quickly scanned our RSS feeds, it only proves that it would have been smarter and better for us to just catch a Goddamned plane to Wondercon, because not only would we have first-person news to report, but at least our hotel would have had fucking Wi-Fi.

But we couldn’t let the Wondercon weekend slip by without reporting on at least something from the convention, and this is the main item that caught our eyes once we had full Internet: Guillermo del Toro held a panel for his upcoming movie Pacific Rim during the convention, and, as one would expect at a comic convention panel where they hold a Q & A session, someone asked del Toro about his reports that he’s working on Dark Universe – a movie focusing on pretty much all the big Vertigo / DC Dark characters.

Now, what one wouldn’t expect is that a director would say anything at all about a roject in pre-production, particularly at a panel about his latest movie that isn’t even out yet. However, this is Guillermo del Toro we’re talking about, and as the director of Blade II and both Hellboy movies, it’s safe to say that he’s one of us, which means he’s probably as excited about the concept of a Justice League Dark movie as the rest of us are.

While is a long way to go to say that: yeah, del Toro let a couple of things about Dark Universe slip.

Guillermo del Toro Working on Dark Universe… Yeah, Basically The 90s Vertigo Comics Movie

Update, 6:40 a.m.: The video after the jump is fixed. What can I say? That Benzedrine’s a hell of a drug.

Guillermo del Toro is finishing up work on Pacific Rim, which will be in theaters in July. And since between movies and books and comics, he seems like a guy who likes to keep busy… you know, in the sense that a methamphetamine addict like to occupy the day by disassembling the television in an attempt to find parts to improve the AK-47 they use to keep the Goddamned bugs away.

Which, as analogies go, certainly is one, but my point is, del Toro probably has another project in mind. And it seems that he does. Is it the adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness that del Toro was working on before the project went tits up? Well, apparently maybe; supposedly he thinks he can get one more bite at that apple, hard R rating and ridiculous budget or no:

“I’m going to try it one more time. Once more into the dark abyss,” he laughed. “We’re gonna do a big presentation of the project again at the start of the year and see if any [studio’s] interested.” And yes, Tom Cruise is still game to be on board if they can find a home for it. “Yeah, Tom is still attached. I think it would be so fantastic to make it with him. He’s been such a great ally of the project.”

Okay, that’s pretty good news… certainly better than the news about the Hulk TV show that del Toro was supposedly working on a few months ago:

“After ‘The Avengers’ there’s been complete radio silence,” he said. “I had one more meeting after ‘Avengers’ with Jeph Loeb from Marvel and he said, ‘We’re working on it, we’re waiting for a writer,’ he gave me the name of the writer and their resume and I said, ‘That sounds great, let’s wait for him’ because we had delivered a teleplay and I haven’t heard since then.”

So yeah, those sound pretty good… but that’s not the good shit. The good shit is that del Toro is apparently working on a project with Warner Bros. A movie including Swamp Thing, John Constantine, Zatanna, Etrigan… pretty much all of the cast of Justice League Dark. And it’s actually in preproduction, with a writer attached and everything.

Monstrous Teasing: Pacific Rim Teaser Video Released

About a year and a half ago, it looked like things were good to go for Guillermo del Toro to get the green light to film a live action adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, with a 150 million dollar budget and a commitment to turn the story of the Antarctic discovery of Elder Things, Shoggoths and Cthulhu into a film with a hard R rating, in accordance with the horror of the original story. That was good. However, at the eleventh hour, Universal pulled the plug on the movie, because it had a 150 million dollar budget and a hard R rating. That was less good.

However, del Toro took the adversity on the chin, wiped it off like a pro, and took the disappointment of suddenly finding himself unable to adapt a classic of the cosmic horror genre to sink his teeth into something equally weighty: a flick about giant monsters and robots.

Pacific Rim is scheduled to open on July 12, 2013, and the first teaser video of the flick has been released, which you can check out after the jump.