For quite a while now, Atonement and The Soloist director Joe Wright has been preparing to make Indian Summer, in which Cate Blanchett would play Edna Mountbatten, wife of Lord Mountbatten, who was the last viceroy of the British Indian Empire and oversaw the country’s transition to independence in 1947.
However Variety now says that the movie has been put on hold indefinitely.
The studio behind the project, Universal, apparently wants to wait for the economic situation to improve before they fund the film, although as so often happens when a movie is pushed to one side, it’ll be a struggle for this one to ever see the light of day. Indian Summer would have been an adaptation Alex von Tunzelmann’s book about the last days of Britain’s colonial rule of India.
Apparently if Wright could have made the movie for under $30 million, UK production comany Working Title could have greenlit the project on its own, but as he believed he could only make the film just above that level, they needed Universal’s approval and the studio has balked. There were also logistical difficulties, involving the fact that the movie would have to be shot in India, and the Indian government was keen to play down suggestions of an affair between Edda Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru (India’s first post-independence prime minister), while the studio wanted this to be the heart of the story.
Both Wright and Blanchett will remain attached to the project in the hope that it can be resurrected at a later date.
The news is the latest in a series of problems for adult-oriented prestige films, which are finding it more and more difficult to get made. Even though Hollywood is having a bumper year at the box office, it’s still having immense difficulty in raising the cash to make films in the first place. The result is that many expect the number of movies to be produced to drop by as much as a third, with more emphasis on blockbusters, as while these cost more to make, the massive potential profits also mean they’re easier to finance.