UPDATED: Have 'Green Hornet' and 'Astro Boy' Suffered from the Economic Kill Switch?
The economy isn't helping Hollywood either
UPDATE: Ain't It Cool News is reporting the news on the scrapping of The Green Hornet is false and Chow is still attached and things remain moving forward.
A pair of feature film casualties may be on the horizon; one that never even began shooting and another that was set to hit theaters on October 23.
First off is news from HitFix citing a source that says Seth Rogen's Green Hornet is on shaky ground and that "it is 'highly unlikely' that the film will shoot in 2009 at all." HitFix's Drew McWeeny reports he spoke with several people at Sundance saying the film was completely off. The complete story is hardly revealed, but once Stephen Chow dropped off as director and was rumored to be potentially dropping out completely after being attached to co-star as Kato, the role once played by the late Bruce Lee.
The other film is Summit Entertainment and Imagi's Astro Boy
as SlashFilm directs us to the blog for The Animation Guild (TAG) which has the headline "Imagi closing down temporarily?"
The opening 'graph reads like this:
We were going to hold off on this till at least Monday, when we could get more information, but a commenter below has broken the news: it appears that Imagi, maker of Astro Boy and Gatchaman, may currently be out of cash and temporarily shutting down operations. We've heard from one of Imagi's Los Angeles animators that he was called at home on Saturday, Jan. 24, and told that the studio was out of cash, and that he should not report to work on Monday. Since this is all happening over the weekend, we've been unable to get any confirmation from official studio sources.
They emphasize how their information is second-hand knowledge but there is chatter of folks being told not to come into work.
In production right now is Summit Entertainment's Astro Boy which was currently set for an October 23 release date, but if these rumors are true there is no telling what will happen.
While I wasn't necessarily excited to see either of these two films I know a lot were (and still are) so let's keep our fingers crossed, especially in hopes that Imagi doesn't suffer any worse than a temporary closing. The last thing we need or want are more people to be unemployed in any line of work.
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I think green hornet was doomed ever since steven chow dropped out of the film. Whenever you loose a film maker that good from your project, I assume that it would just go down hill from there.
I'm actually kind of sad to hear about Astro Boy. It looked interesting enough, but who really knows what's going on at the animation studio, for all we know they might be back on track in a couple weeks or so.
The Green Hornet is definitely on. They are location scouting and stuff. My friend's best friend's boyfriend works at a place they are looking at to shoot.