Won’t someone let Guillermo del Toro make a movie? The Pan’s Labyrinth director had to bail out of The Hobbit last year after strife at MGM caused too many delays, but fortunately, James Cameron came along and offered to produce his passion project: a $150 million, R-rated adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Despite the attachment of star Tom Cruise and a raft of glowing quotes from Universal execs in a recent New Yorker profile of del Toro, the studio declined to give the film a green light, del Toro said today. “Madness has gone dark,” he told The New Yorker. “The ‘R’ did us in.” Either del Toro is still trying to shake the bad luck that rubbed off on him from the famously trouble-plagued Hobbit, or Suri Cruise — whose mother Katie Holmes stars in the long-delayed Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, which del Toro produced — is using him in some sort of very elaborate vendetta against her parents. [NYer]
