The Thing scares up Winstead and Edgerton

As shooting on Matthijs Van Heijningen’s The Thing remake preps to begin shooting on 15 March, the Dutch director has added two names to the cast list.

They are Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton.

Heat Vision reports that Winstead “will play a Ph.D. candidate who joins a Norwegian research team in Antarctica after it discovers an alien ship in the ice. When a trapped organism is freed and begins a series of attacks, she is forced to team with a blue-collar mercenary helicopter pilot (Edgerton) to stop the rampage.”

The ‘alien who came in from the cold’ tale is a remake of John Carpenter’s 1982 Thing , rather than the original 1951 Howard Hawks film.

Remakes can be a bit of a blight on the industry these days, especially when the film that’s being remade still stands as a genre classic (as with Carpenter’s Thing ).

But the fact that Ronald D Moore of Battlestar Galactica is one half of the writing team ( Nightmare On Elm Street remake writer Eric Heisserer is the other) bodes reasonably well.

Meanwhile, Winstead is living up to her promise as one of our choices for Breakout Girls of 2010 . This role should make sure the rest of Hollywood sits up and takes notice of her.

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Josh Winning has worn a lot of hats over the years. Contributing Editor at Total Film, writer for SFX, and senior film writer at the Radio Times. Josh has also penned a novel about mysteries and monsters, is the co-host of a movie podcast, and has a library of pretty phenomenal stories from visiting some of the biggest TV and film sets in the world. He would also like you to know that he "lives for cat videos..." Don't we all, Josh. Don't we all.