Lake Placid

Lake Placid is a series of American monster horror comedy films created by David E. Kelley. Produced and distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, the series began with Lake Placid (1999) directed by Steve Miner, and was followed by five television sequels, Lake Placid 2 (2007) by David Flores, Lake Placid 3 (2010) by Griff Furst, Lake Placid: The Final Chapter (2012) by Don Michael Paul, Lake Placid vs. Anaconda (2015) by A.B. Stone, being a crossover with the Anaconda series, and Lake Placid: Legacy (2018) by Darrell Roodt. Each installment revolves around the presence of giant, 30-foot-long man-eating crocodiles in the fictional location of Black Lake, Maine, and the efforts of various groups to capture or destroy the creatures. All of the films (except for Legacy) reference members of the fictitious Bickerman family. Background During the production of the original film, Stan Winston Studios were hired to produce the 30 feet long animatronic crocodile, which was covered in a water-resistant urethane skin and functioned underwater using waterproofed hydraulics. In 2014, following the re-release of the original film on Blu-ray, Daily Dead interviewed director Steve Miner about the production of the film. According to Miner: "The first thing I did when I got on board Lake Placid was send the script over to Stan. Stan went ahead and began building the main 18-20 foot croc out of pocket even before we had locked down our financing or anything like that. He may have spent close to a million dollars on him- it may not have been that much, but it was close. And that’s such a testament to Stan- I kept telling him that I didn’t even know if we were going to be making the darned movie, but he just kept moving ahead. What I didn’t know when I took on Lake Placid was that it had already been turned down by all the studios so when it came time to put the movie together, it was a little more challenging than I originally thought it was going to be. That’s when I brought in Mike Medavoy and he really got this movie done for us. We started making the rounds again and eventually Fox ended up picking up the movie the second time. Mike then brought these French investors over to Stan’s shop to see the crocodile in action and Stan finished that thing up just in the nick of time.