Fangoria are reporting in their latest feature about Pan’s Labyrinth director, Guillermo del Toro, that he is planning on producing a US remake of the Spanish 2007 horror film, The Orphanage, originally directed by J.A. Bayona. Despite, the box office success of the original, del Toro is is adament that this new production of the film will be somewhat different to it’s Spanish original.

“Even when we produced the Spanish movie, I had intended to remake it,” he reveals, “because we had a very different screenplay that, because of money and time, got turned into the movie you saw—which is great, but there was this other structure for the original script that I wanted to try. So even before we shot [Bayona’s] film, it was an economic decision, a pre-existing creative decision, to change it.” For the new version, “We have Mark Pellington attached as director—I’m a big fan of his MOTHMAN PROPHECIES and his video work—and we are out to actors, so we’re hoping to get things going soon.”

At Sundance 2011 Pellington told Total Film the remake script was an improvement over the original, “It’s the same story but I felt like the script is better,” he said.

So what do you reckon about this remake? Once again, we have the question arising about foreign films and the lack of Western audiences that come to see these films due to their aversion to subtitles. Is this del Toro trying to reach out to his English speaking audience or was he always planning on doing a higher spec version of the film with a larger budget? If that is the case, then why the language change, and not just another version in Spanish? The argument goes all the way back and I suppose with directors like Haneke who did a shot for shot English remake of his film, Funny Games as well as David Fincher’s English remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, coming out later this year, it does make me wonder about the subsequent box office figures that arise from this remakes.