Italy’s Titanus Studio Reboots Manufacturing With Dario Argento Sequel

Italy’s storied Titanus studio, producers of myriad golden period Cinema Italiano works, is getting a reboot and reviving its manufacturing aspect with a number of initiatives in growth, together with a up to date sequel of Dario Argento’s supernatural chiller “Phenomena.” 

Established in 1904 by Gustavo Lombardo, Titanus was a real Italian main, which throughout the Sixties cast a partnership with MGM. They slowed down significantly from the mid-Sixties onwards after Luchino Visconti’s lavish Sicily-set costumer “The Leopard” (1963), starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon, went means over finances. Because the mid-Nineteen Eighties the studio’s output has been on a a lot smaller scale, and primarily for TV.

Now led by former Disney Italy advertising chief Stefano Bethlen, who’s Titanus’ normal supervisor, the corporate – which has a 400-title library comprising early works by Italian masters equivalent to Federico Fellini, and Visconti classics, alongside loads of style fare – is ramping up manufacturing exercise “in two separate strands: legacy, which relies on our library IPs and different classic properties that we purchase, and originals,” stated Bethlen.

On the legacy aspect, Titanus has teamed up with Los Angeles-based firm The Alternate, based and headed by veteran gross sales govt Brian O’Shea, to co-develop a U.S. movie loosely based mostly on “Phenomena,” the cult Argento chiller, which starred Jennifer Connelly because the daughter of a film star who arrives in a rustic known as Swiss Transylvania to attend an unique women college the place pupils are being focused by a vicious killer.

Bethlen, talking at Rome’s MIA market, the place the rebooted Titanus was unveiled to the worldwide trade, stated Titanus has teamed up with The Alternate to co-develop an adaptation of the “Phenomena” IP into “an American movie with a U.S. director and U.S. and worldwide skills,” the thought being “to make a present-day sequel moderately than a remake.” The Alternate would be the “Phenomena” undertaking’s lead, with Titanus holding an fairness stake.

The rebooted Titanus legacy undertaking in probably the most superior state is a TV collection that mines a Seventies Italian IP titled “Piedone,” which is a collection of hit movies starring Bud Spencer, the burly Italian actor who starred in dozens of hit style motion pictures, as a police inspector Rizzo nicknamed “Flatfoot.”

Titanus has teamed up with Fremantle-owned Wildside and Sky Studios on the “Piedone” collection, which is being penned by Peppe Fiore (“The King,” “The Younger Pope”) and “Gomorrah” star Salvatore Esposito, who’s in superior talks to star because the present’s lead.

Bethlen stated that the “Piedone” skein just isn’t a remake however moderately a present-day sequel by which the brand new protagonist knew inspector Rizzo, “and can indirectly personify him.”

On the originals aspect, Titanus is growing a criminal offense collection titled “Ludwig,” co-written by Titanus artistic producer Jacopo Sonnino. The darkish “Ludwig” present relies on the true story of serial killers Wolfgang Abel and Marco Furlan, who operated a neo-Nazi group known as Ludwig that throughout the Nineteen Eighties perpetrated a dozen murders, focusing on homosexuals, substance abusers, a prostitute and two friars, amongst different victims.