Just Say No: Joel Edgerton Passes On ‘300’ Prequel; Fox Won’t Make ‘The Fly’ Sequel; Rupert Wyatt Won’t Direct ‘Londongrad’
The biggest news today has been what people won’t do, rather than movies they will. We started off with Steven Soderbergh’swithdrawalfromThe Man From U.N.C.L.E., and now we move on to the fact thatJoel Edgertonhas said ‘no’ to300: Battle of Artemisia, Fox has decided not to makeDavid Cronenberg’s sequel toThe Fly, andRise of the Planet of the ApesdirectorRupert Wyattwon’t make the true-life ‘poisoned KGB agent’ movieLondongradafter all.
The300news comes from Variety’s Jeff Snieder, who said viaTwitter, “UPDATE: JOEL EDGERTON has passed on the 300 sequel.”
The role wasoffered to Edgertonat the same time that he was said to be up for one of the two lead roles inThe Man From U.N.C.L.E. We’ve since heard that theU.N.C.L.E.gig may not have been an offer so much as a bit of agency machination, perhaps to attempt to massage the300deal. Either way the point is moot asU.N.C.L.E.isn’t happening for a while and Edgerton doesn’t want the role in300: Battle of Artemisia.
And then there’s David Cronenberg’s sequel to his own 1986 filmThe Fly. News of that possibility first cropped up a couple years ago when Cronenberg was said to bewriting and attached to direct a remakeof his own remake.But this fall he said,
The Fly is not exactly a remake, it’s sort of a sequel, kinda. Yeah, that was a thing. I’ve written a script of that, and I don’t know if that’s going to really happen, but that has to do with Fox.
Now there’s another update, as this week he toldThe Playlist, “I wrote a script and at the moment Fox is not wanting to do the project.”
That’s probably for the best — Cronenberg seems energized of late, or perhaps there is just money available for him to use. His new filmA Dangerous Methodis about to see release, and he is already putting the finishing touches on another,Cosmopolis. Hopefully Fox won’t foist his script off on another, less insistent director. I would have been ready to see what ideas interested Cronenberg enough to pull a Ridley Scott and return to one of his best films, but I really don’t want to see anyone else do it.
Cronenberg does continue to talk about asequeltoEastern Promises, which has been a conversation topic for a couple years.Steven Knightscripted a sequel andViggo Mortensenwants to reprise his role as a Russian gangster. That one sounds a bit more viable, as Cronenberg said,
Eastern Promises might happen. There is a script that we all like, including Viggo, and Focus is interested.
Finally, while Warner Bros. was recently moving forward somewhat quickly onLondongrad, which tells of the mysterious death of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned in 2006, the movie has stalled a bit. That’s because Rupert Wyatt, who was briefly looking like the film’s director, won’t make it after all.
Fox wants Wyatt to get moving on anApessequel as fast as possible, and is pulling the contractual leash they’ve got on him. So WB might keepLondongradin its pocket for a while until the next Apes movie is done, or might find somone new.Michael Fassbenderwas being courted to play the lead, but that might now change, too. [Deadline]
