BELIEVE IT OR NOT, CARREY IS OUT OF WORK AGAIN (VAR, THR, SLATE)
By Stephen Saito
For the second time in a month, Jim Carrey is out of work. "Ripley's Believe It Or Not," a biopic of the famous explorer-newspaper columnist starring Jim Carrey that was supposed to start shooting in November, but the pic has been delayed for at least a year for budgetary and "creative changes."
Director Tim Burton will move up his adaptation "Sweeney Todd" with Johnny Depp for early 2007, given the "Pirates of the Caribbean" star's "Shantoram" just fell apart as well.
For Carrey, this is his second straight film to get sidetracked in less than a month after Fox dumped the Jay Roach-directed "Used Guys" due to a skyrocketing budget.
According to Variety, "Ripley's" budget of $150-plus million actually exceeds "Used Guys' " reported $112 million price tag, but Paramount execs insist that the film will get made at least a year from now, after the film is tailored to Carrey and Burton's creative suggestions.
Writes Variety:
"It's the completely opposite situation," Par's co-prexy of production Brad Weston said. "We intend to make the movie with Tim and Jim, and the fact they are meeting later this week to continue working on the script shows our intent to go forward. We wanted to get to the right place creatively and financially, and through our relationship with DreamWorks, this picture switch was made easy and seamless. Everybody is still fully committed to making this happen, and now we can do that without spending money on a weekly basis for pre-production."
Apparently, Carrey wanted to avoid the problems that plagued his Columbia comedy "Fun with Dick and Jane" and Paramount agreed.
Writes Variety:
The decision was made at the conclusion of a process in which the studio scouted locations in China, a process that included gaining permissions from the government to shoot there. It also included haggling over deals. In Carrey's case, he waived his entire upfront salary to unburden the production budget. It was still high, and the backend participation of Carrey and Burton are significant.
Aside from that, Carrey and Burton had ideas to change the script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski in ways significant enough to require rewrites by those scribes and a re-thinking of the f/x budget. The result would change the emphasis from Ripley to some of the wonders he uncovered for his "Believe It or Not" column.
Studio could have pushed the film to spring 2007, but a decision was made to postpone longer so Burton could make the other film.
The film is now likely to start shooting in China in Fall 2007. Meanwhile, Slate's Kim Masters questions whether Carrey's back to back red lights mean the actor's no longer bankable or whether "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" just had too many strange personalities at work, writing:
There's potential for trouble here because Paramount seems to feel that the movie wasn't actually greenlighted. Carrey is still a potent box-office proposition, but he's known for being exceptionally high-maintenance. And as a top executive at another studio points out, getting into this expensive game with Burton and Carrey could be scary. For one thing, the two of them could easily eat up to 30 percent of the movie's gross.
"You have two gifted, extremely talented people, but they both have a tendency toward eccentricity," this executive says. "And when you get two of them together, there are no boundaries. ... You could easily see it going off the rails. I would imagine that the studio was trying to get it more mainstream and less eccentric, and these are guys who believe they can't do anything wrong. They genuinely believe they can't fail. They don't understand the economics of what they do."
Related Links
Burton takes rain check on Par pic (VAR)Burton goes from Ripley to 'Sweeney' (THR)
Is Jim Carrey Box Office Poison? (SLATE)
