Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Fantastic Voyage’ Adaptation Postponed Until After Awards Season

For those of you who don’t incessantly follow everything Guillermo del Toro is working on at any given time, it should be exciting news that he’s been working on an adaptation of sci-fi adventure Fantastic Voyage for a while, and was planning on starting production on it once he was done with The Shape of Water. The bad news is: production has been delayed to possibly next fall, and we won’t get to see the final product until 2020.

According to Deadline, production was set to start next spring, but it’s been pushed forward to the fall. But there is a silver lining! The reason del Toro isn’t jumping aboard Fantastic Voyage at the beginning of next year is because The Shape of Water is about to start its festival run, hopefully picking up some buzz for an Oscar campaign, and Fox wants del Toro to be able to put his full focus into making his next movie. Del Toro is the kind of director who never likes to do a project halfway — he even departed the Pacific Rim sequel in favor of making an original project.

Deadline’s sources do say that del Toro is “firmly committed” to making the movie, so after he’s fully done with The Shape of Water, we can expect to hear more news about this very soon. Fantastic Voyage is a 1966 Richard Fleischer sci-fi about a group of scientists who are shrunk down to microscopic size in order to fix their colleague’s brain. Isaac Asimov’s novelization of the screenplay was written after production on the movie was finished, but came out six months before it was released in theaters.

If you’re bummed at the prospect of being stuck in del Toro withdrawal for the next few years, worry not – The Shape of Water hits theaters December 8.