The Dark Knight won’t be Heath Ledger’s last film
So if a movie featured Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell, you’d pay to go see that right?
What if that movie was directed by Terry Gilliam (director of Time Bandits and 12 Monkeys)?
See, for me, a Terry Gilliam movie would be worth seeing no matter who it starred. But the people who actually buy movies for distributors don’t agree. That’s because Terry Gilliam Movies have lately been gigantic flops, even when they have big stars in them (e.g., The Brothers Grimm).
Now, US distributors are trying to figure out whether they want to release Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.
For U.S. distributors, the quirky Terry Gilliam film — centering on parallel worlds, a theater troupe and a devil-dealing 1,000-year-old doctor — presents a conundrum. On the one hand, it’s a chance for the history-making opportunity — not to mention a marketing coup — of releasing Ledger’s last movie.
But it also comes with challenges that lately have followed the stubbornly noncommercial Gilliam. The director has been behind a series of boxoffice flops and hasn’t had a hit since "Twelve Monkeys" in 1995. Buyers who might otherwise be willing to shell out for a Ledger film are holding back.
"In this market, unless I have a reason to think a movie like this is going to be a slam dunk I’m not going to take a flyer on it, even with Heath Ledger," one distribution executive said. One specialty exec added few execs at his company had been tracking it.
So how do Ledger, Deep, Law, and Farrell all fit in? Well, when Ledger died, he still had a crapload of filming left to do. So, the other A-list actors filled in and donated their fees to Ledger’s family. According to AllMovie.com, each of the actors “serve as alternate-dimension versions of the character originally set to be played by Ledger when the character crosses through a paranormal mirror.”
Again, I don’t need Depp or Ledger to be in this film for me to go see it. Gilliam had me at “paranormal mirror”.
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