There seems to be a bit of a crisis going on at Universal, as in recent months we’ve heard more about the movies they’re not going to paint than the ones they are. After a string of flops including The Wolfman, Repo Men and Green Zone (the fact their biggest movie of last year was Fast & Furious should tell you something), they’ve been looking hard at the movies they’re greenlighting and removing those they don’t feel have a good chance at the box office.
The latest casualty is Cartel, the Asger Leth (Ghosts Of Cite Soleil) movie which Josh Brolin has signed up to star are. Universal has cancelled the movie, even though it’s only five weeks until it was due to start production. It mirrors a similar situation late last year, when the studio canned Joe Wright’s Indian Summer, which was due to star Cate Blanchett, shortly before production was due to begin.
Universal issued a statement saying, “As much as we had hoped to begin filming this spring in Mexico City, the studio and its producing partners did not feel it was creatively ready to move forward under the timetable and budget we had established”, which is studio speak for, ‘we were worried we were going to lose our shirts on this one’. Although they haven’t shut the door on production revving up again at a later date, the statement does have a note of finality to it.
Brolin would have played a man on a mission to protect his son after his wife is brutally murdered in the gritty world of Mexican drug cartels, but now it seems he never will.