Director James Wan, the mind behind Saw, Insidious, and the entire Conjuring universe, has officially announced his next project: a film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s iconic 1928 short story The Call of Cthulhu.
The news surfaced through a Deadline report about upcoming films being developed alongside video game adaptations, which confirmed Wan as director and effectively revealed the project to the public for the first time.
Wan has described the film as a “dream project”, one he has been quietly developing in the background for eight years, most likely while simultaneously working on Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Now that his DC run is over, the Lovecraft adaptation appears to be his primary focus.
What is the Call of Cthulhu actually about?
Lovecraft’s original story follows Francis Thurston, a man who discovers his deceased grand-uncle’s notes and begins investigating a mysterious cult seemingly devoted to an ancient, otherworldly entity known as Cthulhu.
What starts as a straightforward investigation slowly unravels into something far more disturbing, a tale about an incomprehensible cosmic monster that has existed since before humanity, sleeping beneath the ocean and waiting.
The story is widely considered the cornerstone of the entire Cthulhu Mythos, a fictional universe that has since been expanded by writers like Stephen King, Alan Moore, and Robert Bloch, and referenced endlessly in film, television, games, and music, including a Metallica instrumental track.
The only faithful cinematic adaptation of the story to date is a 2005 silent film. More recent productions like Color Out of Space (2019), starring Nicolas Cage, and Suitable Flesh (2023) have drawn on Lovecraftian themes with strong critical reception, but a full-scale, big-budget take on Cthulhu itself has never been attempted, until now.
Wan knows this won’t be easy
In a 2024 interview with Empire, Wan opened up about his approach to the material and didn’t sugarcoat the challenges.
He described a film featuring cities built with “non-Euclidean geometry,” architecture that defies the laws of physics, and a creature so visually overwhelming it literally drives characters to madness upon seeing it.
He called the project “very esoteric” and acknowledged directly that it’s going to be “a hard sell” to studios, even admitting there’s a real chance the movie might not get made at all.
That kind of transparency from a director of Wan’s caliber says a lot. He isn’t trying to sanitize Lovecraft’s vision to make it more commercially digestible, he wants the full, strange, unsettling experience on screen.
The project is also being developed alongside a video game adaptation in partnership with Tencent and other gaming companies, which suggests there is genuine financial interest backing it despite the creative risks involved.
For context, director Guillermo del Toro spent years trying to get his own Lovecraft adaptation, At the Mountains of Madness, off the ground with a reported $150 million budget, and it never happened.
Wan is walking into the same territory knowing that history. No cast has been announced, no release date exists, and no studio has been confirmed, but the project is further along than many people realized.
Are you hyped for James Wan to finally bring Cthulhu to the big screen, or do you think this one might end up in development hell like del Toro’s attempt? Tell us what you think in the comments!