Couple of brief notes from the Twitterverse as Andrew Stanton (WALL•E) tweeted the photo you see to the right with a message saying, “Picture on ‘Carter is finally, officially, gloriously LOCKED! Cheers!”
He’s referring, obviously, to his upcoming film John Carter, the upcoming film adaptation of the Edgar Burroughs book centering on former military captain John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), who is inexplicably transported to Mars where he becomes reluctantly embroiled in a conflict of epic proportions amongst the inhabitants of the planet, including Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe) and the captivating Princess Dejah Thoris (Lily Collins). In a world on the brink of collapse, Carter rediscovers his humanity when he realizes that the survival of Barsoom and its people rests in his hands.
John Carter is set to hit theaters on March 9, 2012, which means we can probably expect Disney to begin the marketing onslaught any minute now. You can watch the first trailer right here.
Elsewhere, uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer took to Twitter today to tell his followers he’s “Back to work prepping for filming in the Spring” on The Lone Ranger. Recently Bruckheimer spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the much-talked-about production, which recently saw its original $250 million budget cut to $215 million. How did they do it? Well, here’s what he had to say:
We redid the production plan. We originally laid it out to avoid winter. Every single location we had, there was winter — 30s at night, 50s during the day, best-case scenario. We were jumping around. California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah. If we had a big crowd scene and then the next day we were shooting just Tonto and the Lone Ranger, we still had the crew “on” because you have them weekly. So we bunched the sequences that were big together, and for the smaller scenes [we] laid off the extras, the effects people, the makeup people. It costs an enormous amount with 150 extras on the set. It’s not the extras, it’s the people that support the extras. You’re still carrying all the wardrobe, makeup and hair people. We bunched together scenes with Tonto and the Lone Ranger, so we had a much smaller crew. We saved about $10 million just by doing that.
Okay, so that takes us to $240 million, what about that next $25m? What about those werewolves?
We cut a sequence involving a coyote attack — supernatural coyotes — and a small animated segment. The train [scenes] are intact. We trimmed it a little bit. Gore [Verbinski] made some sacrifices creatively, but nothing that would hurt the film. We had to work it out. The studio set a number, and it was always our responsibility to get to the number.
You can read the full piece here where he also talks about the release date shift and how the new May 31, 2013 release date is a good shift after they would have originally been going up against The Hobbit and World War Z in December 2012, but now they have a slot just after Fast and the Furious 6 and a couple of weeks before Zack Snyder’s Superman feature, Man of Steel. It’s going to be interesting to see how Lone Ranger shakes out.
Additionally, Bruckheimer tweeted: “[Pirates of the Caribbean] screenwriter Terry Rossio doing his usual phenomenal work on [Pirates of the Caribbean 5].” Interestingly enough, in that same Hollywood Reporter piece he said of Pirates 5, “We’re in the outline phase. We will lay out a story. We have a script, but we decided we could do better.”
Maybe “better” is exactly what Rossio has done or this tweet is just a little encouragement after being quoted saying they have a script but they could do better. Either way, I wonder, will audiences support both a bombastic Lone Ranger film and yet another installment of Pirates?
