Today is a sad day for fans of manly movies about manly things, as it turns out two very different but very promising-sounding gritty crime movies have been put on the shelf. First up is Fox’s reboot of Marvel’s Daredevil character. Remember how Fox only has until October 10 to get a new Daredevil movie shooting before they lose the rights back to Marvel? The story is that they have a script that they like, which adapts Frank Miller’s fairly dark “Born Again” storyline from the comics, and they want Joe Carnahan to direct it, but they’re not really sure if they can get things developed before time runs out.
Rumor had it that Marvel was willing to do some dealing to give Fox the time extension they would need to make the movie possible, but a new development is making it look like Fox refused to play ball and are likely to let the rights to the character lapse. The bad news comes from Joe Carnahan himself, who recently took to his Twitter account (as spied by ComingSoon) to tell his fans, “Think my idea for a certain retro, red-suited, Serpico-styled superhero went up in smoke today kids.” He then followed with, “We shall see. Time is NOT on anyone’s side.”
The deal on the table was that Marvel wanted the rights back for a couple of its Fantastic Four characters in order to give Fox the extension that they need. Looks like the studio decided that maintaining their control of Galactus and the Silver Surfer was more important than turning Carnahan loose with a gritty crime story. The silver lining here, of course, is that now Marvel Studios will likely get the character back, and might put together something even cooler sounding for ol’ horn head.
The next story doesn’t have any sort of silver lining at all. When we last checked in with director David Cronenberg, he was readying the awesome sounding Eastern Promises 2, a sequel that was set to bring both Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel back into the fold to tell the further tales of their ongoing Russian gangster adventures. Why is this awesome-sounding movie no longer being made? Why not hear it from the mouth of Cronenberg himself, who recently broke the bad news in an interview with The Playlist?
When asked what he had coming up in the future, the director responded, “It was supposed to be Eastern Promises 2. But that’s dead.” He didn’t sound too happy about the decision either, because he went on to clarify, “We were supposed to start shooting Eastern Promises 2 in October, [but] it’s done. If you don’t like it, talk to James Schamus at Focus. It was his decision.” Sounds like the bean counters over at Focus took another look at making a sequel for a movie that only made $50 million internationally and got cold feet. Truly, this is a dark day for people who love blind ninja lawyers and naked, bathhouse knife fights.