With less than a year to go until it hits theatres, Disney’s Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie, is starting to run into some problems. According to THR, John Lee Hancock, who helmed and penned The Blind Side, is being called in to write a new opening, for which he will oversee the filming.
“He’s not directing. He wrote pages and I hired a first-time director and it’s good to have him on set,” producer Joe Roth clarified. “The movie is gorgeous to look at and the last 75 minutes are really entertaining.”
Though rewrites and reshoots have spelt trouble for recent films like World War Z and Ronin 47, it doesn’t seem as if the studio is too worried here. They’ve moved the release date forward and Robert Stromberg is still in the director’s chair. The eight days of reshoots won’t involve Jolie either, so these problems likely aren’t too serious.
Then again, although Roth is trying to reassure us that it’s not a big deal, I don’t know if we can trust him. Sure, eight days of reshoots isn’t anything crazy and the fact that Jolie won’t be there means that it can’t be that problematic but still, Stromberg is a first time director and trying to manage a project of this scale is likely quite a challenge for him.
Hopefully everything turns out ok here. The mouse house has a lot riding on the $200 million dollar film, which is a re-telling of Sleeping Beauty but from the perspective of the titular antagonist. If it fails, it will be yet another huge flop for the studio, after recent efforts like John Carter and The Lone Ranger.
Unfortunately, it will be a while before we know how Maleficent turns out, as its release date is set for May 30th, 2014. What do you think though? Is Disney set to have another bomb on their hands?
