Are we at the point where big-budget movies are no longer too big to fail?
Let’s me explain: up until Disney put a stop to its upcoming Lone Ranger due to concerns over its ballooning budget — it was later restarted under a reduced budget — studios have rarely put the brakes on a movie well into pre-production and definitely once a few million had been spent, casts had been hired, and production underway. After all, even if things aren’t going so well it previously seemed to studios that gambling on the crappy result of an overblown budget was the lesser of two evils rather than scrapping the entire film. Heck, we just saw that recently with the latest Bridget Jones sequel, which reportedly has some major script issues. Even if the movie ends up with a cruddy script it’ll still get shot — there’s too much money invested already.
But we’ve seen it a lot more recently with Warner Bros. cancelling Arthur & Lancelot over its price tag, and it’s happened again today, with Deadline reporting that Legendary Studios has announced that it has scrapped its adaptation of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost after multiple delays over budget concerns. The film’s special effects budget — it is about the fall of Lucifer and the ensuing war between heaven and hell, so it would require Lord of the Rings scaled battles — could not be brought down to an amount Legendary was willing to spend. The film was originally set to shoot in January, but was rescheduled for the summer before it was officially canceled. Had the film gotten made, it would’ve been directed by Alex Proyas and we would’ve seen Bradley Cooper as Lucifer, Benjamin Walker as the archangel Michael, Diego Boneta playing Adam and Camilla Belle as Eve.
Of course, the Deadline article suggests that production on the film might start again eventually, but in the past when a film has been outright canceled it usually isn’t attempted again in similar circumstances. Case in point, the Tim Burton Superman Lives project, which was to star Nicholas Cage. That project, originally set for a 1998 release, never made it out and it wasn’t until 2006 that a much different Superman project, Superman Returns, was released. So anyone hoping that Paradise Lost gets back into production within the next few years… don’t hold your breath.
Still, the one positive thing is that perhaps studios are finally paying more attention to their wallets, realizing that throwing films that cost $125 million into the multiplexes isn’t a sure thing. So, uh, does that mean we’ll generally see less crap being churned out? One can only hope.
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