With a prime opening slot for "Birdman" at the Venice Film Festival next month, things look to be going pretty well for Alejandro González Iñárritu, and he even has "The Revenant" with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy gearing up to shoot this fall. Or does he?
THR reports that the film, which was slated to start shooting in September, is now in jeopardy after the troubled production company Worldview Entertainment backed out of financing the movie. 20th Century Fox isn’t interested in putting up the money themselves citing the pay-or-play deals for the two leads (meaning they get paid even if the movie doesn’t get made), but there’s more complications. In a typically ambitious move by Iñárritu, he wants to shoot the movie—about a 19th century fur trapper who is mauled by a grizzly bear, left for dead and robbed, who then goes on a mission of vengeance—in sequence, which would add $7 million dollars to the budget.
But hope is on the horizon with every cinephile’s fave, Megan Ellison ("The Master," "Her," "Zero Dark Thirty," "Killing Them Softly"), looking to step in and back the movie via Annapurna Pictures. So fingers crossed that Iñárritu gets to the shoot the movie the way he wants, and everything stays on track for what sounds like a potentially great film.
