John August Explains The Death of ‘Shazam!’

Neil Miller — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:50:08 +0000

Believe it or not, but I’ve been following the development of John August’s Shazam! since Comic-Con 2007, when attached director Peter Segal and I chatted briefly about it during an interview for Get Smart, a film that was not even done shooting yet. And here we are more than a year later and the film is dead. It’s amazing what can happen in a year’s time. As August explained on his personal blog yesterday, Shazam! has died in the script stage due to some cold feet and misguided direction of the execs at Warner Bros.

“When we turned the new draft in to the studio, we got a reaction that made me wonder if anyone at Warners had actually read previous drafts or the associated notes,” explained the scribe, whose previous work includes Go and Big Fish. “The studio felt the movie played too young. They wanted edgier. They wanted Billy to be older. They wanted Black Adam to appear much earlier. (I pointed out that Black Adam appears on page one, but never got a response.)”

Furthermore, August cited the failure of the kid-friendly Speed Racer and the overwhelming success of The Dark Knight as the basis for hesitation among the decision makers at WB. It is clear that Warners’ higher ups are more concerned with replicating the good and avoiding what has gone wrong than taking each project on its own merits. To do this, August says, “ignores the success of Iron Man, which spent most of its running time as a comedic origin story, and the even more pertinent example of WB’s own Harry Potter series. I tried to make this case, to no avail.”

It is sad really, as both August and director Pete Segal seemed to have a lot of enthusiasm for bringing such a classic character to the big screen. I had faith that they would have been able to adapt a story which was created in the early 1970s for a modern audience. And whether it was kid-friendly or not, it still would have been cool. Aparently my opinion is not shared with the people holding the checkbook at WB. Too bad.

Jurassic Park 4 Dead, No Dinos With Laser-Beams

Neil Miller — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 03:51:54 +0000

It feels like the last time we were talking about Jurassic Park 4 we were all very excited about this particular line of plot synopsis, “the film is about the government who has trained dinosaurs to carry weapons and use them for battle purposes.” Absolutely brilliant if you ask me — who doesn’t want to see dinosaurs with laser-beams strapped to their backs, fighting off insurgents.

Alas, it was not meant to be. Today our friends at Coming Soon dropped into the junket for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall said that another movie probably won’t happen. “I don’t know,” Kennedy explained. “You know, when Crichton passed away, I sorta felt maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s a sign that we don’t mess with it.”

In all seriousness I can’t say that I blame them. It is impossible to be sure what they were even thinking when the ‘dinosaurs with weapons’ storyline came about. As well, the future could hold more great dinosaur movies, but those can certainly exist outside the Jurassic park universe. Why can’t we take a look into a story that is, um, based on an original idea?

Lay your thoughts and worries about the idea of more Jurassic Park in the comment area below…

Film School Rejects » Dead in the Water

John August Explains The Death of ‘Shazam!’

Related Reading:

Jurassic Park 4 Dead, No Dinos With Laser-Beams

Related Reading: