1994 It was a great year for the career of Jim Carrey, since it premiered ‘Ace Ventura, a different detective’ (‘Ace Ventura, Pet Detective’), ‘The mask’ (‘The Mask’) and ‘Two very silly fools’ (‘Dumb and Dumber’), thus becoming a Hollywood star. However, that second film was about to be very different, because Chuck Russellits director, has revealed that the initial idea of New Line was to make a horror movie in the vein of Freddy Krueger.
From terror to comedy: success
Remember that Russell had already contributed his grain of sand to the saga led by robert englund with ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors’ (‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors’), one of the best sequels in horror movies, so you know what you are talking about when making that comparison . He himself has remembered how was the project originally when New Line took over the rights to the character:
“It’s a great example of fighting for your vision of the movie. We changed it from a horror movie to a comedy. It was conceived as a horror movie. That was the battle. New Line wanted a new movie along the lines of Freddy ( Krueger) By coincidence, I had seen the same original The Mask comic that they ended up buying and thought, ‘That’s really cool, but it’s too much like Freddy Krueger.’
“He really was. He put on the mask and killed people. And he had one-liners. It was really cool, it was full of gore and it was a black and white comic. Then they redid the comics to look like the movie, but The originals were really cool, dark and scary, but I knew that as a movie it would have been too much like Freddy Krueger.”
The truth is it’s not hard to see how the character could be given a sinister twistbecause it tells the story of a normal man who acts like a madman after putting on a unique green mask that literally possesses whoever wears it.
With that premise and the original comics of darkhorse as a base they could have bet on terror very easily, but Russell did not want to go easy. Of course, he himself admits that it would have been almost impossible to have turned it into a comedy of his if he had not counted on Carrey:
“I had recently seen Jim Carrey in a stand-up at the Comedy Store on Sunset and was blown away. He seemed like a live hallucination. While working with him, I used to give him certain physical comedy challenges that neither he nor I could imagine. We really enjoyed it because we got him to take it a little further. He was like, ‘Boy, I don’t know, I just think of something and go for it.’
Has a lot of talent. He is a comedy genius. I said we had to hire him. We developed it for him. People have asked me who he would have hired if we didn’t have Jim. I take a look at my old list and it had Matthew Broderick and Nicolas Cage on it as possibilities, but it was Jim who inspired it all. I don’t think anyone other than Jim could have helped us make a good comedy out of that material.
Then Jim read the draft and said, ‘My God, it’s like it was written for me.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s because it is, and I hope you do it.’ Nobody really wanted him back then as a lead. He hadn’t done ‘Ace Ventura, a different detective’ yet, but I knew it was the only way to do it. He read it and said, ‘I’ll be doing this role at supermarket openings when I’m 70.'”
Then the movie became one of the most celebrated comedies of the 90s, and also one of the highest grossing, since it raised more than 351 million dollars. Not bad if we also take into account that its budget was barely 23 million dollars, so today perhaps some of its special effects are too loud. However, the film made history, finished off Carrey’s career and also made known to Cameron Diaz.
The son of the mask: failure
Unfortunately, its success meant that New Line executives couldn’t resist making a belated sequel, ‘The Mask 2’ (‘Son of the Mask’, it’s on Netflix) where Carrey didn’t want to participate. The leading role was assumed by jamie kennedyknown for giving life to the mythical character of Randy Meeks in the ‘Scream’ saga, and the result was a catastrophe in every way. By focusing on the economic, the cost skyrocketed to 84 million dollars and then only 57 million dollars entered worldwide.
The franchise was dead, or at least that’s how it will be until they decide to do a reboot or remake, which we all know will at least be talked about at one point or another. From ‘Ace Ventura’ it is assumed that there is already one underway and in this case there would be more reason to do so considering the source material created by Mike Richardson.
In Espinof | When Jim Carrey had one of the worst years of his career without releasing any movies (despite the fact that he was already one of the biggest stars in Hollywood)