The first result of this was Frankenstein and the Wolfman, a collaboration between Universal and ILM that hoped to revive Universal’s horror properties of the 1930s. According to Carson, this was a potential way for ILM as a company to diversify and future-proof itself against the potential erosion of the visual effects business. The plan was that ILM would develop concepts for animated films, and then offer their services to other studios to help develop these projects further. Not keen on missing out, ILM’s then-president, Jim Morris, established a team of eight people to develop ideas for CG-animated feature films. When Pixar’s film about sentient toys became a critical and commercial hit, many of Lucasfilm’s competitors rushed to develop similar computer-animated projects to capitalize on the new innovation in digital effects. And he feared that the studios would gladly hire them.” He feared a future where small groups of people with modest amounts of money could use computers to create effects similar to what ILM was currently providing, but at far less cost. “Computers were constantly becoming more powerful but cheaper. “Doug Norby, the president of Lucasfilm, feared what might happen if computers were increasingly used to create visual effects,” Carson tells us. Despite the success of these films, Carson says that ILM executives harbored fears about how digital effects would impact the visual effects industry. ILM typically worked with real materials, such as plastics, rubber, and foam core, to produce effects for movies, but as the ’80s gave way to the ’90s, the company began experimenting more and more with computers, pioneering industry-leading digital effects for films such as The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Jurassic Park. Carson, who was working as a visual effects art director at the time, says that Lucasfilm felt it had achieved all it could with the computer graphics division, and wanted to focus on its own film projects, as well as its famous visual effects company, ILM. Pixar originated as a group within Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division it was spun out of the company as a separate corporation in early 1986. When Carson talks about Monkey Island, he begins with the tale of another canceled ILM project: Frankenstein and the Wolfman. Together with former members of ILM, he gave us new insight into the making of the Monkey Island film. Carson had been a visual artist at ILM for many decades, working on films such Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, The Goonies, and Jurassic Park, before becoming part of the digital story department tasked with developing concepts and treatments for computer-animated features in the late ’90s. Who was involved? How far did it get to completion? Why was it canceled? Recently, we were put in contact with the director of this long-forgotten project, David Carson, who had previously never commented publicly on his connection to the film. In the years since, many questions about the film have lingered. That was when the Monkey Island Special Edition Collection came out, containing storyboards of the film that the project lead for these games, Craig Derrick, had located and cleared for release. Lucasfilm didn’t publicly confirm the Monkey Island film’s existence until 2011. But that hasn’t stopped people from speculating over the decades on what happened to it - one persistent rumor being that the project eventually morphed into the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, 2003’s The Curse of the Black Pearl. Lucasfilm has not shared many details publicly about the film since its cancellation in 2001, when the company shut down ILM’s digital story department, the division working on the project. In addition, there were some high-profile names in the world of film attached, with Steven Spielberg even linked to the project as a producer. Not only was this an attempt to bring the Monkey Island games to the screen, but it signaled one of Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic’s first attempts to enter the world of digital features (a feat ILM wouldn’t manage until a decade later with Rango). In this graveyard of scrapped and forgotten projects, you’ll find the story of The Curse of Monkey Island, an undeveloped animated film named after the third game in the popular video game series. Over the almost 50 years that Lucasfilm has been a company, some notable projects have fallen by the wayside - from games such as Star Wars 1313, Project Ragtag, and Star Wars: First Assault to films including George Lucas’ original sequel trilogy.
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