Bavaria Film has announced it’s plotting a remake of German boat-movie maestro Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 war epic Das Boot. The original—both one of the most expensive and one of the highest-grossing films in the history of German cinema—tells the story of a crew aboard a German submarine during World War II, and highlights the terror and the tedium of war, with an emphasis on the psychological. It’s an intense and immensely powerful film, and one that isn’t exactly crying out to be remade, especially as a director’s cut of the film was released to box-office success in 1997.

Money’s money, though, and, per Variety, after a couple of recent, expensive flops—2012’s long costume drama Ludwig II and this year’s disappointing, long costume drama Beloved Sisters come to mind— Bavaria Film’s co-CEO Christian Franckenstein is cutting the shit and trying to make a U-boatload of cash with this one, focusing primarily on the film’s “potential profitability.” What they plan to do, precisely, in order to maximize the profit on their remake is unclear, though it seems likely they won’t go so far as to make a film about Germans in WWII that has a happy ending. Considering how much money the original made, though—more than seven times its budget—if he puts all the pieces in the right places, it sounds like Franckenstein could have a real monster on his hands.

The original film, which stars Jürgen Prochnow (who went on to act in Dune and Beverly Hills Cop II), Herbert Grönemeyer (who went on to become the most successful recording artist of all time in Germany), and Klaus Wennemann (who went on to do very little else), was nominated for six Academy Awards (including Best Director and Adapted Screenplay) and re-released as a six-part mini-series. It also helped launch Petersen into the ocean of big-budget Hollywood successes, both boat-related (The Perfect Storm, Poseidon) and not (The NeverEnding Story, Troy).

Bavaria Film, which made the original Das Boot, is also looking into remaking some of its other properties. Already planned is a reboot of 1966 cult lo-fi sci-fi West German TV series Raumpatrouille Orion (Space Patrol), which centers on a hot-dogging American space pilot who heads a crew in the lead-up to a space war with aliens called Frogs, and which, frankly, sounds absolutely incredible.