Sony To Release James Gunn Horror Film This Year

Before being fired from Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 the week of Comic Con International in San Diego last week, filmmaker James Gunn was expected to appear at the convention's Sony panel with a mystery announcement. That announcement -- a horror movie the filmmaker has apparently already completed production on -- is now on Sony's schedule for November 30.

It is unlikely that Gunn directed the movie. Instead, it is almost certainly the Elizabeth Banks-starring horror movie directed by Gunn's longtime friend and collaborator David Yarovesky. Jackson Dunn (Shameless), David Denman (Power Rangers), Meredith Hagner, and Matt Jones also star.

Since being fired for numerous years-old tweets, which featured inappropriate humor of all kinds but most notoriously jokes about rape and pedophilia, Gunn's profile outside of Disney has only risen. With more than 375,000 names on a petition to restore him to the director's chair for the third and final Guardians film, other studios are seeing potential upside to hiring the filmmaker once he is free of his Marvel commitments. An exit deal for Gunn is reportedly still being negotiated.

There are essentially no details about the film, other than the fact that it is a horror movie and that it will be released in November. Sony confirmed for Screen Rant that the still-untitled movie is still on the schedule in spite of no announcement being made at Comic Con. If it is, as expected, the Yarovesky-directed film, then Brian and Mark Gunn wrote the script, which was financed by The H Collective and produced by The H Collective alongside James Gunn and Troll Court Entertainment.

Gunn has not directed a non-Marvel film in the time since he started the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, but a movie he wrote -- The Belko Experiment -- was produced at Blumhouse by director Greg McLean. That script was quite old and had been floating around Hollywood for a while, and the production itself ended up conflicting with shooting on the Guardians films, so Gunn was fairly hands-off on it. That does not seem to be the case with the Sony project.

The glyphs Gunn shared on Twitter with his initial tease of the Sony panel encouraged a number of fans to speculate that the project might be on an adaptation of the Japanese manga Berserk, the Image Comics series Nameless, or Bloodborne, a PS4 game from 2015. It is difficult to imagine a recognizable property being adapted entirely in secret, but stranger things have happened in Hollywood.

The November 30 date had previously been held for a suspense movie from filmmaker Adam Robitel titled The Escape Room, which began its life at Sony as The Maze. That movie has been pushed to February.