Visualize our excitement for Universal’s jazzed-up remake of “The Wolf Man” as a beautiful Greek statue. Now watch as every new development starts to chip it away, piece by disappointing piece. Studio hack craftsman Joe Johnston replaces risky music video auteur Mark Romanek in the director’s chair — lop a leg off. Danny Elfman’s atmospheric score replaced by the guy that did the music for the “Death Race” remake – there goes an arm… etc.
Now, with a month left until the movie’s release, our excitement more or less resembles a dusty pile of rubble. And the hits just keep coming.
To make matters worse, we now hear — from a source close to the project —that Donna Langely, Universal’s production president, is holed up with a different editor. (Remember when Universal hired the great editor/sound designer Walter Murch (“Apocalypse Now”) and Mark Goldblatt to try and salvage this disaster? It’s part of the reason Elfman left — because the movie was still an amorphous blob and he had other shit to do.) Elsewhere, the film’s director, Johnston, is cutting his own version of the movie, even though he’s supposedly waist-deep in pre-production work for Marvel’s “Captain America.”
Generally in these scenarios, the studio will test both versions with audiences to see which one “plays” better. A similar situation arose in the notoriously thorny post-production of Andrew Dominik’s wonderful “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” (After the studio’s version tested just as poorly as Dominik’s they conceded and the director’s version remained.) The difference between “Jesse James” and “Wolf Man” however, is the amount of time involved. While both had an outrageously lengthy post period, “Wolf Man”‘s new behind-the-scenes shenanigans are happening within weeks of the film’s supposed release (February 12), which means that they don’t exactly have the luxury of time on their side to test-run different cuts.
What’s more is that the expensive “Wolf Man” is holding up Universal from making any more big decisions, re: big budget projects. We’re sure that all the additional Universal Horror remakes in the pipeline (including the “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” which recently landed Carl Erik Rinsch as its director) are in a perilous place too.
So how will “The Wolf Man” turn out? Well, it’s now almost certainly going to be a huge fucking mess, the result of a creatively compromised project that has had far too many cooks in the kitchen all the way through. Which version will they ultimately choose? Which one will be “better”? At this point that’s probably a trick question. — Drew Taylor
Update: By now you’ve probably seen this story denied the world round; this is an expensive movie and Universal is a big machine and has a lot invested in it. They’ll do what they can, even give interviews to other outlets to debunk. But we stand by this story. In fact our source tells us the situation has really been “worse” and we could get into it, but the kool-aid drinking geek community (who love this shit and who studios puppet around to do their bidding) have already cause enough ruckus. Proof will be in the pudding when this incoherent beast finally hits theaters.