June 16, 2016

On this week’s episode of the Shock Waves podcast, we had very special guests “masters of horror” Mick Garris and William Malone on the show. On top of being huge horror fans themselves, Mick was one of the credited screenwriters on 1989’s THE FLY II and William owns the light board from Dr. Delambre’s laboratory in the original 1958 version of THE FLY, so we figured they’d be the ideal people to discuss the entire FLY franchise with.

During the discussion, an interesting tidbit came up that this writer had never heard about before. Mick Garris asked, “I wonder whatever happened to FLIES? They were going to do FLIES, in the same way they made ALIENS (to ALIEN), but I remember they announced FLIES. And Geena Davis was going to produce it.”

This is the first time we’d ever heard of a proposed third FLY movie for the 80’s franchise. A bit of research online didn’t net any concrete results, but Garris remembers an initial studio announcement. “Well, FLIES was announced as a sequel several years later, much in the way that ALIEN became ALIENS. 20th Century Fox was going to do the same thing with FLIES and act as if THE FLY II didn’t happen. Geena Davis was producing it and she was going to star in it. I know that they developed scripts, although I’ve never seen any of them. I don’t know what it was about, but I do know she was going to star in it and it was going to be a bigger budget, high profile movie.”

This would’ve been around the mid-90’s when Geena Davis was regularly working with her then-husband Renny Harlin on CUTTHROAT ISLAND and THE LONG KISS GOODBYE, so would he have been the one that would’ve directed it? In an old issue of Fangoria that mentioned the announcement, the one plot detail that emerged was that Davis’ character Veronica would’ve given birth to twins in the opening, hence FLIES! This wouldn’t be the last attempt at a third FLY movie.

Back in 2011, there was talk of David Cronenberg making another version of THE FLY – not necessarily a remake, but more of a sequel in that same world, but the studio passed. He explained to IndieWire in a 2012 interview, “It wasn’t really a remake, it was more of a sequel or a sidebar. It was a meditation on fly-ness. None of the same characters or anything and, of course, with an understanding of modern technology. It was something I was very pleased with and it was a disappointment not to get it made.”

This wouldn’t have been the first time Cronenberg had resurrected THE FLY. Back in 2007, he re-teamed up with his composer Howard Shore and put on an opera version of THE FLY in France, followed by a brief LA stint in 2008. The reviews, however, were not very kind and the show ended rather quickly.

Regardless, it would’ve been interesting to see what Cronenberg would’ve done with his 2011 update, but more than anything, I’m intrigued at the prospect of the unmade, Geena Davis fronted big budget sequel FLIES!

You can listen to Mick’s comments on the latest Shock Waves episode embedded below. It’s first mentioned at around the 1:20 mark, and then again at 1:48.