The Thing Prequel Gets A Release Date Universal announced that The Thing prequel starring Joel Edgerton and Mary Elizabeth Winstead will hit theaters on April 29th, 2011, that is 2 weeks before Wes Craven’s SCREAM 4. Edgerton previously said that this prequel pays homage to the original version, that there’s a lot of tie-ins as to how the base comes to be the way it is in the 1982 John Carpenter film starring Kurt Russell, which was about scientists in the Antarctic confronted by a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of the people that it kills. Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen, in The Thing Prequel, Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays 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. Official synopsis Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of