If you’re of a certain age (translation: old), you’re likely to remember staying home on Saturday nights to watch The Love Boat and Fantasy Island on ABC, because they both were enormous hits in the late ’70s/early ’80s that featured many celebrities of the time as guest stars.
Blumhouse Pictures seems to have cracked the code for bringing Fantasy Island to the big screen along with filmmaker Jeff Wadlow (Kick-Ass 2), and that’s by turning it into a full-on horror movie ala Escape Room earlier this year. That movie was also released by Sony Pictures as will the upcoming Fantasy Island movie, because the original show was produced by Sony Pictures Television.
Many people won’t remember this far back but the original series came from out of two popular television movies, starring Latin superstar Ricardo Montalbán as Mr. Rourke and Hervé Villachez (from The Man with the Golden Gun) as his sidekick Tattoo. (Before starring on Fantasy Island, Montalbán was mostly known for the Planet of the Apes movies and a little ditty called Volaré.) Each week, they’d greet their guests on the seaplane and grant them their fantasies with the warning that there may be a risk involved.
The concept is pretty much the same for the Blumhouse/Sony movie, except in this case, the fantasies and risks of Fantasy Island’s guests turn out to be quite deadly.
Michael Peña from Ant-Man plays Mr. Roarke in the movie, joined by Maggie Q, Lucy Hale from Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare?, Austin Stowell (Catch-22), Portia Doubleday, Jimmy O. Yang (Crazy Rich Asians), Ryan Hansen and Michael Rooker.
The first trailer for Fantasy Island premiered in front of Doctor Sleep over the weekend and will likely be in front of Charlie’s Angels this weekend, but you can also watch it below. The movie will open nationwide on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2020.
Oh, sure. Fantasy Island gets a movie reboot with a Valentine’s Day release, but no Love Boat gets nothing…
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