{"id":486609,"date":"2026-05-15T20:50:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T20:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/486609\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T20:50:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T20:50:13","slug":"sam-raimi-to-direct-remake-of-ventriloquist-horror-movie-magic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/486609\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Raimi to Direct Remake of Ventriloquist Horror Movie &#8216;Magic&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/t\/sam-raimi\/\" id=\"auto-tag_sam-raimi_1\" data-tag=\"sam-raimi\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Sam Raimi<\/a> has settled on his next directing effort.<br \/>\u00a0<br \/>As his follow-up to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/t\/send-help\/\" id=\"auto-tag_send-help_1\" data-tag=\"send-help\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Send Help<\/a>, his twisty survival thriller released by 20th Century\/Disney earlier this year, Raimi will direct Magic, Lionsgate\u2019s modern take on a William Goldman novel that was previously turned into a 1978 cult horror classic that featured Anthony Hopkins as a mentally unstable ventriloquist.<br \/>\u00a0<br \/>Raimi was already on board to produce the remake, having set it at his eponymous production company last year. Also producing are Roy Lee as well as Chris Hammond and Tim Sullivan, the latter two who long championed the project and guided its development by tracking down the original rights.<br \/>\u00a0<br \/>Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, who wrote Send Help for Raimi and who previously penned\u00a0Freddy vs. Jason\u00a0and the remake of\u00a0Friday the 13th,\u00a0wrote the script for Magic, which will be an updated take on the 1976 novel by William Goldman. (Goldman also wrote the script for the original adaptation.)<br \/>\u00a0<br \/>Magic\u00a0starred Hopkins as Corky, a magician who reaches fame alongside his ventriloquist\u2019s dummy, the obnoxious and wisecracking Fats. Faced with the prospect of signing a network deal for his own show but afraid of revealing his fragile mental state, the magician takes off for the Catskills, where he tries to reconnect with a high school love, even as Fats begins to murderously take control of the situation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n\tThe movie also starred Ann-Margret and Burgess Meredith and was directed by Richard Attenborough. The movie generated buzz before its release by 20th Century Fox with a TV ad that focused just on the face of the dummy, which declared \u201cMagic is fun, we\u2019re dead.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n\tRaimi Productions\u2019 Zainab Azizi will also produce. Nathan Kahane and Paul Fishkin\u00a0will executive produce alongside\u00a0Andrew Childs\u00a0for Vertigo.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n\tMeredith Wieck and Pavan Kalidindi are overseeing the project for Lionsgate.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n\tSend Help, which starred Rachel McAdams and Dylan O\u2019Brien, was a surprise and modest hit when it hit theaters on Jan. 30. The movie was a return to horror form for Raimi, generating some of his better reviews in more than 15 years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/  a-font-body-m     \">\n\t\u201cHis coming aboard represents one of the truly great matches of director and material,\u201d said Lionsgate\u2019s motion picture group chair Adam Fogelson as part of a statement obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Raimi has settled on his next directing effort.\u00a0As his follow-up to Send Help, his twisty survival thriller&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[18,117,19,17,327,28853,73432],"class_list":{"0":"post-486609","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-sam-raimi","14":"tag-send-help"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116580569989453038","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}