Way back in 1990, a dark horror film titled Flatliners managed to put Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Julia Roberts, Oliver Platt, and William Baldwin all on the same screen together. The film wasn’t an overwhelming success by today’s standards, but it did manage to pull together a tidy sum ($61.5 million domestically) for its story of a medical experiment gone horribly — and supernaturally — wrong.
More than 20 years later, the Joel Schumacher film is the latest project to receive attention as potential remake fodder, according to a new report on ComingSoon.net.
The site reports that Columbia Pictures is developing a new film based on Flatliners, and has hired The Source Code writer Ben Ripley to author a screenplay for it.
In the original film, Sutherland and a group of fellow medical students engage in an experiment to determine what happens in the moments after death. As their experiments with “flatlining” their own bodies (shutting down their brain and heart to the point of clinical death) dive deeper into the post-death period, they discover that when they returned from the dead, they brought something back with them.
There’s no word on a timetable for the Flatliners remake, though it will be interesting to see whether any of the original cast members make a cameo.
