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 Nineteen Sixties solid a partnership with MGM. They slowed down significantly from the mid-Nineteen Sixties onwards after Luchino Visconti’s lavish Sicily-set costumer “The Leopard” (1963), starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon, went method over finances. For the reason that mid-Eighties the studio’s output has been on a a lot smaller scale, and primarily for TV.

Now led by former Disney Italy advertising and marketing chief Stefano Bethlen, who’s Titanus’ common 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 is predicated on our library IPs and different classic properties that we purchase, and originals,” mentioned Bethlen.

On the legacy aspect, Titanus has teamed up with Los Angeles-based firm The Change, 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 referred to as Swiss Transylvania to attend an unique ladies faculty 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 business, mentioned Titanus has teamed up with The Change to co-develop an adaptation of the “Phenomena” IP into “an American movie with a U.S. director and U.S. and worldwide abilities,” the concept being “to make a present-day sequel fairly than a remake.” The Change would be the “Phenomena” challenge’s lead, with Titanus holding an fairness stake.

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

Titanus has teamed up with Fremantle-owned Wildside and Sky Studios on the “Piedone” sequence, 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 mentioned that the “Piedone” skein just isn’t a remake however fairly a present-day sequel through which the brand new protagonist knew inspector Rizzo, “and can in a roundabout way personify him.”

On the originals aspect, Titanus is growing against the law sequence titled “Ludwig,” co-written by Titanus inventive producer Jacopo Sonnino. The darkish “Ludwig” present is predicated on the actual story of serial killers Wolfgang Abel and Marco Furlan, who operated a neo-Nazi group referred to as Ludwig that throughout the Eighties perpetrated a dozen murders, focusing on homosexuals, substance abusers, a prostitute and two friars, amongst different victims.