PAN - Taking on Water? Moved to October

[AndyDursin]

Now here's a much better trailer than JURASSIC WORLD...even if the live-action PAN's been done to death (and I thought the last version was actually pretty decent, especially when I watched it a second time).

Joe Wright is a good director, and Dario Marianelli scoring is also a heck of a lot more exciting than Team Zimmer. Count me in the cautiously optimistic camp.

[Paul MacLean]

The score might be good, but visually it looks formulaic to me.

I'm also annoyed by yet another prequel / re-imaging of a famous story in which the villain is shown to be a "good person" who only turns bad because someone is mean to them (which presumably is the case with James Hook).

[AndyDursin]

I think there's only so much you can do with Peter Pan at this point. It's going to look like HOOK or the 2003 movie -- or any other treatment of the material because it's been done so often over the years.

What intrigues me is Joe Wright directing this film, and he's done some excellent character pieces -- especially his PRIDE AND PREJUDICE which I felt was terrific (and also beautifully scored by Marianelli). He's certainly not a hack and hasn't made a big summer movie before. Even HANNA, which I didn't like at all, was interestingly made...so I think there's some hope here that the movie is going to have a unique point of view.

Story wise, it also seems to have enough of an angle to it to differentiate it from previous pictures...of course, we'll see when it comes out.

[Monterey Jack]

Rooney Mara as Tiger Lilly? Could they have picked a PALER actress to play a Native American character?

[AndyDursin]

While it's not what I would've done, from what I've read they've scrubbed the Native American angle out of the film and the character altogether. That looks to be the case since they were apparently going after Lupita Nyong'o for the role as well.

So this is a case of damned if they do, damned if they don't -- and PETER PAN has some of those tricky "racially insensitive" elements within it. NBC has already rewritten "racially insensitive" lyrics out of next week's PETER PAN live musical broadcast so Warner Bros., I'm guessing, just decided to cut bait with the whole Indian element so as to not offend anyone.

Of course, now they're offended that the character's background has been changed and there's a white woman in the role. Not that I'm a big Rooney Mara fan but to me it's not a big deal.

Beyond that, when you boil it down, it's also a business decision. If a studio wants to put a white woman in a purely fantasy role for business purposes (it's not like Tiger Lilly was a real person), they will.

Affirmative Action doesn't really translate to mutli-million dollar blockbusters. Are these all the same people offended that Daddy Warbucks is "Benjamin Stacks" in the new ANNIE film? I'm guessing not. lol

[AndyDursin]

Moved to October....likely a smart idea to avoid the insanely long barrage of "tentpoles" and sequels that extend all the way from May to August.

http://variety.com/2015/film/news/pan-r ... 201476156/

Warner Bros. has pushed back the release date of “Pan” to October in an effort to avoid a big crowd at the summer box office.

The Peter Pan original tale, directed by Joe Wright, will now open Oct. 9, instead of July 24. Starring Hugh Jackman and Garrett Hedlund, the 3D adventure pic was surrounded by tentpoles like Marvel’s “Ant-Man” and Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible” sequel.

“We wanted to give ‘Pan’ the space to extend its theatrical run, so taking it out of the cluttered summer season made the most sense,” WB distribution exec Dan Fellman said.

Jason Fuchs penned the new take on the classic story. Set during WWII, it follows an orphan who is kidnapped by pirates and brought to Neverland, where he discovers he’s destined to save the land from the pirate Blackbeard (Jackman).

Hedlund plays a young Hook, while Levi Miller stars as Peter Pan. The feature also features Rooney Mara and Amanda Seyfried.

Greg Berlanti, Paul Webster and Sarah Schechter are producing “Pan,” with Courtenay Valenti and Andrew Fischel overseeing for the studio. The movie was shot last year in London.

[Monterey Jack]

They've also dumped Dario Marianelli's score and are replacing him with John Powell. While Powell is far and away the best of the "Zimmer Pets" and I'm sure he'll come up with a suitable score, it's odd to see a strong director/composer relationship (that has resulted in an Oscar win and two nominations) come to an end like this. It's likely that the studio insisted.

[AndyDursin]

That's a very, very bad sign. Hadn't heard of that.

Put that and the release date shift together, and it's troublesome. No question.

[Monterey Jack]

If Powell can come up with something akin to his wonderful How To Train Your Dragon scores, I'd be happy, but it's still worrisome to see a fruitful director/composer partnership getting severed like this, and I wonder why Wright didn't try to keep Marianelli attached to the project. Maybe its a Bridge Of Spies situation where there was a scheduling/health conflict (hard to believe John Williams would have passed up a new Spielberg movie unless there was absolutely no way to do it), and it's not like Wright hasn't used a different composer before (like that earbleed-inducing techno "music" for Hanna ), but still...I would have loved to have heard a lush, old-school Marianelli score for this.

[AndyDursin]

This just smacks of a studio starting to panic after getting poor feedback from preview audiences. Move the release date, change the music -- we've seen it happen before.

Wright may well have fought for the music, but ultimately, he's not Spielberg or Scorsese. If the film is in trouble, the studio has spent so much on it that they will do whatever they can to get the preview numbers up (same thing happened on KING KONG, right, where someone decided Howard Shore's music wasn't working either. I can't imagine Jackson was behind that decision).

I don't mind Powell at all, but even if he does a good job, we know his style, which is more along the lines of Zimmer than the standard, old-school romantic orchestral sensibility.

Could be -- my guess -- that the film isn't testing well, the music might be too restrained/not sugarcoated enough to instruct the viewer how to feel every friggin' second. Changing the music up to something "tried and true" in today's market is one of the easiest fixes they can make to a film before doing something more drastic, like re-editing or the huge expense of reshooting. That'll come next.

[Monterey Jack]

Wright may well have fought for the music, but ultimately, he's not Spielberg or Scorsese.

And even Scorsese was unable to keep Elmer Bernstein's music to Gangs Of New York in the film (although it was so heavilly recut by Harvey Scissorhands that it probably wouldn't have fit anyways).

[AndyDursin]

Yeah exactly. When the studio puts the money down, it's really their call in the end.

Not sure if you saw the FSM board but Ford Thaxton claims that the film is delayed so it can be made more "family friendly" including the depiction of certain characters (which I can only assume has something to do with the "outrage" over Rooney Mara's Tiger Lily character).

If that's accurate, that's genuinely disheartening. And it could make for yet another out-and-out disaster for Warner Bros. How do you greenlight PAN and bring in Joe Wright to make his vision, then have buyer's remorse after you've spent how many millions? This is the same studio that gave the Wachowskis carte blanche to go out and make dung like CLOUD ATLAS and JUPITER ASCENDING, and has made similarly baffling decisions.

Who knows if it's true, but right now, I'd buy it. If the film just shifted its release date, it'd be one thing, but also tossing out Marianelli's music is a sign of a project that could be in deep trouble.

[Monterey Jack]

I've noticed on the poster that two cinematographers are credited (Wright regular Seamus McGarvey and John Matheson), which is always a sign that a movie has had heavy reshoots.

[mkaroly]

Gotta be honest, HOOK spoiled this story for me. Great music, awful film.

[AndyDursin]

I've noticed on the poster that two cinematographers are credited (Wright regular Seamus McGarvey and John Matheson), which is always a sign that a movie has had heavy reshoots.

That's never a good sign at all, and is a total sign of a problem shoot (along with the rejected score). It's too bad we'll never know what exactly Wright's real version of the film would've looked like.

To me, this PAN looks a lot like the PJ Hogan version from 2003, which at the time I only thought was OK, but has grown on me on subsequent viewing. It has held up better than HOOK, which leaves a bad taste in the mouth despite its positive attributes (the music, some of the individual set pieces, etc).