This story is pretty inside-Hollywood and “how the sausage is made,” but trust me when I say that all of this affects some people that you actually care about at a gossip level, like Alexander Skarsgard and Ben Affleck. First off, Pan flopped HARD at the box office. Like it was a $150 million belly flop. Warner Brothers produced Pan and God knows why they sank so much money into it, but they did and now they’ve spent another $150-180 million on a film that might end up bringing in $20-30 million in domestic and international box office, if that. The Pan flop is coming off a particularly bad time because Warner Bros also produced Jupiter Ascending, which lost more than $100 million for the studio and The Man From UNCLE, which flopped but will probably not be as big of a loss (and I actually saw the film and it wasn’t terrible).
So what’s the next big flop for Warner Bros? Tarzan. Tarzan has already been shot – starring Alexander Skarsgard as Tarzan and Margot Robbie as Jane – and it’s set for a July 2016 release. Only the film is a mess.
Still tallying its staggering loss on Pan, Warner Bros. is said to be facing an unusual challenge on its next mega-budgeted fantasy reboot: Tarzan. With the film still needing considerable work before its July 1 release date, director David Yates has started shooting his next Warners project, J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Warners sources say the move from Tarzan to Beasts always was planned. “While it’s somewhat unusual, we are extremely comfortable with the production timelines, which were set in advance, and have total confidence in the skill of David Yates — who is a four-time Harry Potter director — to deliver both of these pictures,” says a Warners executive (Yates declined to comment).
But one source involved with the project is concerned that Tarzan, with a budget of around $180 million and packed with visual effects, isn’t getting the attention it needs. “The schedule of the J.K. Rowling movie got in the way of an appropriate postproduction schedule on Tarzan,” says this person. “Why would you ever crowd a director into starting a movie before his other movie is properly finished?”
Sources say early test screenings of Tarzan, an adventure starring Alexander Skarsgard of HBO’s True Blood as the vine-swinger and Margot Robbie as Jane, did not go well. But studio sources say the film is not finished and it’s routine for movies to be revised and improved. And a Warners insider notes that both Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood have gone into preproduction on projects before their previous film is finished, though none has been as expensive, complicated or challenged as Tarzan appears to be.
Yates began shooting Beasts, starring Eddie Redmayne and a large ensemble cast, in August, and a studio source says he is focused on that film during the week while reviewing edits of Tarzan on weekends. Sources say if that process proves too cumbersome to get the movie ready in time, Warners could push the film off its summer release date. Warners has Guy Ritchie’s Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur on July 22 and the DC Comics team-up Suicide Squad on Aug. 5, so its schedule is crowded, and the studio has bumped a July release each of the past two summers, Jupiter Ascending and Pan.
One insider notes that Tarzan also has suffered the loss of producer Jerry Weintraub, who died unexpectedly July 6: “If there was a strong independent producer on the movie, this could have been managed better.” And a high-level executive at another studio expresses doubt about the viability of the Tarzan property and casting a relative unknown, Skarsgard, as the lead, saying, “You shouldn’t make that movie without an actor you’re dying to see in the part.”
Wall Street analyst Harold Vogel says he wouldn’t judge any film before its release but has concerns about the Warners slate in general. “The whole strategy over the last two years has been to emulate Disney and Marvel,” he says. “It shows a possible exhaustion of ideas.” He points to the studio’s attempt to invigorate DC, which begins in earnest with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (March 25), as well as making such fantasy fare as Pan, Tarzan, King Arthur and a live-action Jungle Book set for 2017, more than a year after Disney’s Jon Favreau-directed version of the Rudyard Kipling novel opens.
[From THR]
I just don’t see why any studio would sink more than $100 million into a Tarzan movie, even if it starred someone like Chris Hemsworth. But to put that kind of money into a film starring Skarsgard is absurd (and I’m a fan!). It seems like Warner Bros doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing these days. I actually wonder if Suicide Squad and Batman vs. Superman are going to be the beginning of the end for these comic book movies – so much money has gone into them and the financial model doesn’t even make sense at this point. Like, if the superhero film doesn’t make $500 million or more, it’s a flop. It’s not sustainable.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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