Brad Pitt in David Fincher's Fight Club
Last week's release of the trailer for David Fincher's new film The Killer. The film, starring Michael Fassbender as an implacable and highly organized killer gone rogue, caused quite a stir on social media ahead of its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. But there was also a palpable sense of relief that the painting actually existed.
Fincher's adaptation of Alexis «Matz» Nolent's French graphic novel was first announced in 2007, with frequent collaborator Brad Pitt expected to star. As the years passed, many assumed that, like many other projects the brilliant but energetic director had been associated with, it would simply be abandoned.
Of course, it's par for the course in Hollywood that many films are announced but never made. There isn't a working director today who hasn't spent time and effort developing a film, only for it to fall apart. However, the demanding Fincher, who is known for a Kubrickian level of control on set, including endless takes, has been involved in numerous projects that came tantalizingly close to completion only to fizzle out.
Some of them would undoubtedly have been masterpieces, others were probably better off abandoned, and one was halfway through filming when the plug was pulled. Here are 10 of David Fincher's unrealized «what if» films and TV series as we eagerly await the rapid-fire arrival of The Killer.
1. Spider-Man
Sam Raimi's excellent first two Spider-Man films were an interesting indicator of what would happen if the web-slinging marvel was left in the hands of an auteur director. But Sony also approached Fincher before the first film was made and asked how he would take the material. The director had no interest in comic books or superhero depictions (“I loved that stuff when I was 8, but by the time I was 11 I had almost forgotten about it,” he commented dismissively), but he had an innovative concept. it involved exploring Spider-Man's origin story in a one-shot ten-minute title and began with Peter Parker being fully aware of his powers.
As Fincher put it, “It was a completely different story, it wasn’t the story of a teenager. It was more like a guy who became a freak.» It would have been a great idea, but Sony wanted something more traditional, so Raimi did a great job leading up to the dark third installment in the series.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Photo credit: Niko Tavernise
However, one of his concepts eventually came to fruition. Fincher suggested that he would have made Gwen Stacy the female lead and then killed her off; this ultimately happened when Gwen (Emma Stone) met her end in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
2. Meeting with Rama
Of all Fincher's yet-to-be-made films, perhaps the most talked about — and certainly most regretted — is his supposed landmark Arthur C. Clarke adaptation Rendezvous with Rama, which could have been an epic sci-fi drama on the scale of 2001: A Space Odyssey » , and just as smart and demanding. A passion project for Fincher's Se7en star Morgan Freeman, the director attached to the film back in 2001 and in a 2008 interview suggested it was a complex and daunting endeavor, saying: «There was so much that was shot for Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Aliens… so many movies owe their plots and stuff to that story, so we have to be careful about what part we're going to use because there's a lot of literary conceit in there. It may not be the most cinematic experience.»
Arthur Clarke with Stanley Kubrick in 1968 Photo: Rex
However, later that year, he declared the project finished because «there is no script… we tried to do it, but it probably won't happen.» In 2019, he attributed the film's failure to the fact that it was a «giant, expensive movie that didn't have any toys… there were no attractions to be gleaned from it.» Dune director Denis Villeneuve has now expressed interest in directing it, meaning the project could still appear in some form.
3. Utopia
After Fincher collaborated harmoniously with writer Gillian Flynn on an adaptation of her novel Gone Girl, the two wanted to take on another project and so settled on an American version of the 2013 Channel 4 sci-fi series Utopia, which was set in the US. to star in Fincher's adaptation of Rooney Mara's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The project might have seemed like an obvious choice, especially since the director said, «I love the characters—I love [writer Dennis Kelly's] honesty and affinity for nerds»—but it fell apart due to disputes with HBO over the budget.
Fincher later commented that «we had really, really good scripts and a great cast and we were preparing for it, and you know it was $9 million… after all, if you actually put it all out there… it turned out to be 9 million dollars.” Overall, it doesn't seem like there's a huge discrepancy between what we wanted to do and what they wanted to pay for.» The series was later revived by Amazon Prime without Fincher but with Flynn, but it was unpopular with both critics and audiences and was ultimately canceled after one season.
4. Mission: Impossible III
JJ Abrams' role in the Tom Cruise franchise remains the world's highest-grossing role, and it's not hard to see why; Philip Seymour Hoffman's charismatically creepy villain aside, this is a surprisingly low-stakes picture that at times feels like a very expensive TV pilot. This could be due to a tortuous development process that saw a number of actors (including Kenneth Branagh and Scarlett Johansson) join and then leave the project, as well as a revolving door of directors that included Narc director Joe Carnahan and Fincher.
David Fincher on the set of “The Social Network” Photo: Alamy
The final film's vision revolved around what he called a «cool idea, really violent» — rumored to center on organ trafficking in Africa — but Fincher's grit and darkness were a poor fit for the fundamentally uncontroversial series, and so he walked away. Cruise briefly discussed his departure on the Light the Fuse podcast last year and commented, «You know, he's so talented and it would have been so different… I don't know what it would have been, but it wasn't.» I kind of understand what the Mission is.” Fincher's Mission: Impossible may have been exciting, but we'll never see it.
5. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Recent news that the big budget prequel to Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Nautilus, has been canceled by Disney+ — despite the fact that it has already been created — suggests that the material may be cursed. Fincher spent considerable time developing the project in the early 2010s and envisioned it as a big-budget summer blockbuster, shot in then-fashionable 3D, starring Brad Pitt as dashing harpooner Ned Land; it would also reunite him with Se7en writer Andrew Kevin Walker. However, Fincher did not meet the deadline because Disney, badly burned by the failure of The Lone Ranger and John Carter, was no longer willing to invest in original projects that would not necessarily attract a mass audience, and Fincher, no matter what. his critical acclaim hardly qualified him as a professional commercial director.
Poster for the 1954 film “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” Author: Ronald Grant Archive
After a final disagreement over who would play the lead after Pitt left—Fincher favored Channing Tatum, the studio wanted Chris Hemsworth—the project collapsed. The director later commented on the “fucking cool” project: “I really wanted to do it, but in the end I didn’t have the strength to do it. Many people succeed in Hollywood studios because they are based on fear. It's hard for me to deal with this because I feel like our biggest responsibility is to give the audience something they haven't seen before.»
6. The Girl Who Played with Fire
In hindsight, the decision (under Fincher's direction) to market 2011's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as a «cringe-worthy Christmas movie» may have led to its commercial disappointment. Although the novel was to become a worldwide bestseller and the film, starring Rooney Mara as the title character Lisbeth Scalander, was a moderate success, it was not a breakthrough.
So while Fincher was initially expected to direct sequels to The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest back-to-back, that didn't happen, despite what the director said about the first sequel. “I think since [Sony] has already spent millions of dollars on the rights and the script, it means it will lead to something… The script that we have now [has] a lot of potential, I can reveal as much as it is completely different.” . from book». After all, none of series creator Stieg Larsson's novels have been made into English-language films, and the 2018 film based on the follow-up book, The Girl in the Spider's Web, flopped at the box office, suggesting that Lisbeth audiences have long since grown tired of Lisbeth.
7. Steve Jobs
For a recent article in this newspaper, I chose Danny Boyle's excellent Steve Jobs as one of my underrated films, but it could have been something else entirely. After Fincher and Aaron Sorkin successfully collaborated on The Social Network (for which Sorkin won an Oscar but Fincher inexplicably did not), the pair were expected to reunite for the screenwriter's biopic of Apple co-founder Jobs. Christian Bale as Fincher's first choice to play the brilliant but megalomaniacal genius.
Michael Fassbender in Steve Jobs » Photo: AP
However, the project fell apart due to Fincher's demands for an advance payment of $10 million, as well as — as usual — a contribution to marketing; With memories of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's disastrous performance still fresh, a Sony source openly criticized Fincher, saying, «You're not doing Transformers here.» You're not in Captain America. This quality is not flashy commercialism. He should be rewarded for success, but not immediately.” Universal eventually picked up the project and it worked very well, but it remains a tantalizing «what could have been» in Fincher's career.
8. Sequel to World War Z
After Fincher's first film, Alien 3, was a horrific experience for the director, who subsequently disowned the film, he could be forgiven for never wanting to make a sequel to a film he didn't direct himself. And given the notorious production difficulties faced by Brad Pitt's zombie thriller World War Z, including the need to reshoot the entire final third of the film, it seemed surprising that Fincher was attached to direct its sequel for a considerable time. , reuniting with Pitt to create a $200 million blockbuster.
Brad Pitt in “World War Z” Photo: AP
However, the project was first heavily delayed due to the director's involvement in the first episode of Netflix's Mindhunter, and then was eventually canceled outright, to the apparent irritation of Pitt and Fincher, who never reunited after 2008's Mysterious Case. Benjamin Button.
One of the reasons Paramount chickened out was because the then-all-important Chinese market was against anything involving ghosts or the undead, meaning it would have a hard time recouping its budget upon release. Pitt expressed regret that the film would not be released in 2019, saying: «We had a really good story that he led, a really strong story. What [Fincher] had planned for it just hadn't been seen yet. I'm sure he'll put it on something else.»
9. Sequel to Star Wars
Fincher began his career as an assistant camera operator and matte producer at Industrial Light and Magic, and one of the first films he worked on was Return of the Jedi. It would be a fitting homecoming then if he directed one of the rebooted Star Wars films, for which he was approached in both 2014 and 2017 to direct the films that would become, respectively, The Force Awakens and «Skywalker.» Ascension». But he rejected Kathleen Kennedy's Lucasfilm pitch both times, first saying, «My favorite movie is The Empire Strikes Back.» If I said, “I want to do something else like this,” I'm sure the people who paid for it would say, “No!” You can't do that! We want it to be just like that one with all creatures!”
“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.” Ascension» Photo: Lucasfilm LLC
Although he was kind enough to call directing one of the films «no easy task,» Fincher suggested, «You have to make sure that this is what you want to do… because it's two years of your life, 14 hours anyway.» . a day, seven days a week. There's no getting around it,» and said of Abrams' decision to return to the franchise after Rian Johnson's divisive The Last Jedi: «I can't imagine the fortitude it would take to follow the success of these last ones. This is a completely different level.”
10. Video synchronizations
This series differs from other projects discussed here in that it was filmed, at least partially. Fincher was hired to develop and partially direct a ten-episode series for HBO, following the misadventures of an ambitious young man trying to make a name for himself in the music video industry of the early eighties (he directed promos for Vogue and several other Madonna songs). Considering Fincher began his career in a similar way, this was perhaps his most autobiographical work to date.
About halfway through production, however, HBO was apparently dissatisfied with the discrepancy between the half-hour comedy it In their opinion, they ordered, and the darker and weirder show that Fincher produced, pulled the plug.
Although it was initially announced as a hiatus rather than an outright cancellation, filming never resumed and the unfinished episodes never resurfaced. After his disappointing experience with HBO on both that series and Utopia, it's no surprise that Fincher instead headed to Netflix and House of Cards, followed by Mank, Manhunter, and now «To the killer.»
Свежие комментарии