Some movies are seemingly cursed, and everything that could possibly go wrong does go wrong.
Take, for example, Chaos Walking.
Starring Spider-Man and Rey, aka Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, it should be a sure-fire
crowd-pleaser.
So why has the studio declared it unreleasable?
Chaos Walking is based on a trilogy of books by novelist Patrick Ness.
The story takes place on an alien planet called New World, settled by Puritan-like humans
who left what's presumably Earth more than 20 years before the events of the first book,
The Knife of Never Letting Go.
On this planet, all living beings can hear and see one another's thoughts in the form
of an unrelenting cacophony of images, words, and sounds, which everyone accurately calls
"Noise."
In other words, it's chaos walking.
"What if you couldn't get away?
What if you really couldn't get away?
What if there was no escape?"
As the plot unfolds, a teenager named Todd finds a place where there is no Noise.
He flees the male-only settlement of Prentisstown and meets a woman named Viola, which is remarkable,
as nobody knew there were any non-males on New World.
Eventually there's a showdown between human settlers and the intelligent native race called
the Spackle.
In 2016, it was reported that Tom Holland was cast to play Todd and Daisy Ridley was
all set to play Viola.
Lionsgate grabbed the rights to adapt and produce a Chaos Walking film way back in 2011.
At the time, the studio had carved out a lucrative niche for itself as the company that made
all the major big-screen versions of super-popular young adult novel franchises.
Having already brought Twilight from the bookstore to the multiplex and with the first Hunger
Games movie on the way, Chaos Walking seemed like the next logical step.
Some major players started to surround the project.
Robert Zemeckis, the filmmaker behind Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, was supposed
to direct, but that deal ultimately fell apart, though he remained on as a producer.
It was perhaps a sign of trouble to come that there was apparently a struggle to find a
director to commit to a project with so much potential.
A long five years after announcing the project, Lionsgate revealed that filming could begin
in the fall of 2016, now with Doug Liman in the director's chair.
With Liman behind the camera, filming on Chaos Walking finally commenced in August 2017 in
Montreal.
By that time, the rest of the cast had been filled out, with such notable names as David
Oyelowo, Demian Bichir, Mads Mikkelsen, and Nick Jonas.
The shoot seemingly went well, but the result of the tireless and expensive efforts of cast
and crew didn't quite meet studio expectations.
According to Lionsgate employees close to the situation, the first cut of Chaos Walking
turned out so badly that studio executives deemed it, quote, "unreleasable."
It had cost a staggering $100 million, but it was apparently so awful once assembled
that it wasn't fit for public consumption.
So Lionsgate canceled the film's scheduled March 2019 release and ordered up extensive
reshoots that would cost millions and take three weeks to film.
If studios invest a fortune in a major movie and a rough cut seems lackluster, it makes
sense to spend a few more million on reshoots.
In recent years, for example, Justice League and Shazam! have made headlines for re-assembling
casts and crews to film extensive new scenes not long before their scheduled theatrical
releases.
To generate new script pages for Chaos Walking, Lionsgate hired Patrick Ness, the novels'
author.
While Ness likely had relatively little trouble pinpointing just what was missing from the
adaptation, actually filming those scenes proved difficult.
Reshoot plans were announced in April 2018, but cameras didn't start to roll until April
2019.
The reason was that in the time after principal photography wrapped, the careers of stars
Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley exploded.
Ultimately, there was a gap of about 18 months between the first and last scenes shot.
Holland and Ridley don't quite look like teenagers anymore, meaning that they would appear strikingly
and distractingly different from scene to scene.
When Lionsgate kicked off pre-production on Chaos Walking in 2011, sweeping movie series
based on bestselling young adult sagas were all the rage.
The four Hunger Games films took in more than $1.4 billion at the domestic box office, while
the likes of The Maze Runner and Divergent also performed well.
But within a couple of years, the dystopian young adult trend was starting to lose its
luster.
The third Divergent movie did so poorly at the box office that a wrap-up finale was canceled,
and standalone adaptations like The 5th Wave bombed hard.
By the time production on Chaos Walking began in earnest in 2016, the writing was on the
wall that this was a movie past its sell-by date.
But there are still plans to get it into theaters at some point!
As of summer 2019, it's tentatively scheduled for release in 2020.
But for now, it remains a film in limbo, as confusing as the chaos in its title.
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