It seems Universal isn’t particularly happy with how the Meet The Parents sequel, Little Fockers, is turning out. While you wouldn’t think it’d be too tough to make a Meet The Parents movie, the studio is said to be so worried about how things are going that, according to Deadline, they even considered replacing director Paul Weitz with John Hamburg, but decided against it because they knew it would cause a firestorm with the Director’s Guild.
Now the movie is headed into reshoots, which isn’t too remarkable in itself, as most films have a day or two of extra shooting just to iron things out and add in helpful little pick-ups. However with Little Fockers it seems they’re planning a full seven days of shooting, with all the main cast members expected to return, which is fairly unusual.
And if a rumour over at Vulture is to be believed, Universal is so worried that they’re even talking to Dustin Hoffman about coming back and reprising his role as Bernie Focker from Meet The Fockers. Hoffman was part of the original plans for Little Fockers, but he decided against the movie and was written out, with the whole movie shot without him. However now Universal apparently badly want him back, and are negotiating to get him to film new scenes during the reshoots, in the hope it’ll magically make the film better.
It’s difficult to say how much trouble Little Fockers is in (the trailer looked okay – pretty much promising much the same as we’ve seen before), but however much studios like to deny it, when it comes to reports of films in crisis, normally where there’s smoke, there’s fire.