While Paul WS Anderson is yet to make a truly good movie, he makes watchable ones that don’t cost extorionate amounts to make, such as Resident Evil, Event Horizon and Death Race, which have ensured he’s been able to continue making movies.
However it appears he’s jumping back into the big budget leagues with Pompeii, a Roman historical epic set around the time of the infamous volcanic eruption. Anderson hasn’t had a huge amount of luck with massive budget movies – 1998’s Soldier, starring Kurt Russell, is still the most expensive films ever to fail to get a cinema release in the UK – but hopefully this will work for him.
THR, which likens the movie to Titanic due to it being about a historical disaster but anchored by a love story, says ‘Set in late summer 79 A.D., Pompeii revolves around the slave of a shipping tycoon who dreams of the day he can buy his freedom and marry his master’s daughter. What the slave doesn’t know is that she’s already been promised to a corrupt Roman senator, while he’s been sold to another owner. Just when things can’t get any worse, Mt. Vesuvius erupts with the power of 40 nuclear bombs. But the slave is trapped on a ship headed for Naples, separated from his love and best friend, a gladiator who is trapped in the city’s coliseum. As fire and ash destroy the only world he’s ever known, the slave is determined to get back and rescue them.’
Anderson is currently finishing work on his 3D Three Musketeers movie, which is due for release this October, with plans to shoot Pompeii next Spring, based on a script by Lee Batchler and Janet Scott Batchler. However a lot of this will depend on selling the foreign rights to the movie to buyers at the Cannes Film Market later this month.