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Mere days from release, just how much trouble is The Dark Tower really in?

August 2nd, 2017 by Marc Comments

We’re only days away from the release of The Dark Tower and we haven’t seen any screenings or reviews yet, so we have to say we’re already a little worried.

But it seems that there may be plenty of other reasons to be concerned as the word is that the movie had/has serious problems.

A new report on the movie says that Modi Wiczyk, co-founder of MRC, and Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman were very concerned over the first edit of the movie by director Nikolaj Arcel and considered replacing him with someone else.

Concerned? That’s not it all…

As director of A Royal Affair and screenwriter of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and a big fan of Stephen King’s books, Arcel seemed to be the perfect choice for the gig, however word from the set was that he was in ‘over his head’ on the project and its $66m budget.

On top of this, word is that, although final effects work wasn’t finished, the movie was screened waaaaaaay back in  October (remember it was originally meant to come out in February this year?) but was universally poorly rated with the audience claiming the mythology of the movie wasn’t explained well and was difficult to make sense of.

Eventually it was decided that bringing in another filmmaker to retweak the movie wasn’t a good idea as the cost would have been too much, so Ron Howard (who was originally set to direct the movie a few years ago at Universal) and co-writer Akiva Goldsman sat down with Arcel to try to make the movie into something more coherent.

Arcel, however, insists that the problems were to be expected and not worrisome: “On a film with two studios and powerful producers, obviously there is much passionate creative debate on how to work certain ideas or beats. But I felt supported throughout, and they all looked to me for answers. If someone had jumped into my editing room and taken over — I would have left instantly.”

Rothman and Wiczyk also wanted to put the record straight and insist that everything was fine: “We shot this on time and on budget,” said Wiczyk, “We didn’t go over our schedule by even a day [and] we would never marginalize or remove a director or dare to edit a film.”

Some of the problems may lie in the deal that allowed MRC and Sony to make the movie together with both studios financing the movie and having a deal that meant if either seise was unhappy, changes had to be made – this apparently led to a ‘too many cooks’ scenario that resulted in a final version of the movie becoming almost impossible to achieve. Stephen King himself is rumoured to have had final approval on much of the movie too.

Undoubtedly The Dark Tower was a story that many believed was unfilmable because it is just so complex and spans worlds, realities, time, and ever popular culture, so it was never going to be an  easy project to tackle, so the reshoots costing $6m aren’t a concern – we’re learning that reshoots on big movies are now pretty much expected.

The reshoots here reportedly were “to fill in more backstory about Elba’s character’s hatred for McConaughey’s Man in Black. In addition, to better familiarize audiences with Mid-World, the film’s magical setting, five minutes of exposition were cut and a new scene was shot to combine ideas that had been sprinkled throughout the picture.”

The movie opens on August 4th in the US and on August 18th in the UK. We’re guessing we’ll all know how bad – or good – things are soon enough.

Source: Variety

Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….