All of you Meg fans, including Cinematical horror expert Scott Weinberg, should be happy to hear that the movie is not quite dead in the water yet. Novelist Steve Alten, who has written four Meg books, is still having ongoing discussions with other studios now that New Line has abandoned the project. He mentioned this during an exclusive interview with the Monsterfest Blog, and he also stated that Jan De Bont is still the best director to handle an adaptation of his giant shark tale. However, the script by Shane Salerno will likely not be able to be transported to whatever studio picks the thing up.

In the interview, Alten details the history of the Meg movie rights, and now I feel pretty bad for ever criticizing modern novelists for having it so easy when Hollywood comes calling. Alten claims he had to sell his car just to get the first book edited. Then he sold the rights to Disney/Hollywood Pictures and was able to buy a house. Then Disney didn't end up making the thing and Alten lost the house. He likely had thought he was on top again when New Line acquired the rights, but obviously now the author is in a downward slope once again. Alten says that the problem at Disney was that neither a script by Tom Wheeler or a script from Jeff Boam (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) met with execs approval, and then all those execs left the studio and Meg was forgotten. He doesn't go into the reasons for the project's failure at New Line, but we had heard before he felt the studio treated it like "an unwanted stepchild." Hopefully Alten can find the right studio execs who will treat Meg like a media-friendly celebrity treats an adopted child.

Steve Alten's mega-shark tale is apparently dead in the water. It's been quite the journey for this property: Alten wrote the book Meg years ago and has babied it into becoming a workable film script ever since. First, Disney purchased the rights to make the film, then New Line purchased it from Disney, and as it turns out, New Line really doesn't want it anymore and will allow their ownership to expire come October of this year. Although a major setback, Alten presumably won't allow New Line to bite the head off the project completely.

Early news of Meg, the movie version, was brought to you by Scott Weinberg back in January. He's read the book -- I haven't; I already have a hard enough time getting in the water and can't stop reading Murakami -- and according to him, the book , "could make for a pretty slick movie!" He also noted that he wasn't sure if the extravagant budget would see the film all the way through production or if the entire project would sink. It apparently sunk. In Alten's announcement, via Moviehole, he seems somewhat beaten, declaring that New Line treated the project like an "unwanted stepchild," but his heart is still attached to seeing his book on the big screen one way or the other. As he says, "The MEG movie WILL HAPPEN and it is better to wait and do it right with the right team than accept mediocrity." I personally can't wait to see the film actually happen. If it's done right, I'll never go in the ocean again without a harpoon and a floaty.

Several years back I read a book called MEG by Steve Alten. It's about a massive prehistoric shark who ascends from the deepest depths of the Marianas Trench and caused all sorts of high-end mayhem. (Picture a shark about the size of a blimp.) I distinctly remember thinking as I read the novel: Wow, it'd be really expensive, but darn this could make for a pretty slick movie!

And then Disney bought the movie rights, which they held on to for a while before New Line came in and picked the property up "in turnaround." Since then we've learned that Jan De Bont has been signed to direct the big shark adventure and that action veteran Shane Salerno would be on adaptation detail ... so where's the production date? Where are all the casting reports?

Well, according to Variety, New Line might be just a little bit stingy with the purse-strings these days, what with big projects like Rush Hour 3 and The Golden Compass demanding so many resources -- but De Bont is still confident that MEG will see the inside of a multiplex, most likely sometime in 2008. Obviously it's the mega-pricey FX work that's causing MEG to swim extra slowly -- or for all we know New Line might just decide to ashcan the whole darn thing.

But I really hope not. The world deserves a movie in which a blimp-sized monster shark who chows down on yachts and helicopters. Well, I deserve one anyway.

Several years ago I stepped into a local "mom & pop-owned" bookstore, on the hunt for a new horror novel to read. (I read horror novels like most people eat fast food.) The first thing I saw was a really big display full of paperbacks called MEG, and attached to the display was a hand-written sign that read: "Local author Steve Alten's smash sensation!" Now, I'm all about supporting my Philadelphia brethren, but it wasn't the sign (or the fact that Steve and I graduated from the same high school) that commanded my attention.

It was the massive prehistoric shark that caught my eye. (Yes, just like the one seen in the above pic, which is a piece of MEG pre-production concept art that recently surfaced at CHUD.com.)

MEG is short for Megalodon, and a Megalodon is a giant shark that could swallow a boat without even bothering to use its teeth. Obviously I dropped the eight bucks on the novel, read the thing in less than a week, and then loaned it out to some friends. (A few years later I was happy to pick up Alten's MEG sequels, The Trench and Primal Waters.) Since I'm nothing if not a ravenous geek, especially when giant prehistoric sharks are involved, I read all three novels with a cinematic eye, occasionally thinking things like "oooh, that'd make for a great action scene" or "hmm, I wonder what actor would play this character..."