Just recently, we were reporting that Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg were going to team up for the upcoming film “The Six Billion Dollar Man.” The film is yet another Hollywood attempt to remake a classic TV property with a new film. We’ve seen it time and time again, with films like “CHiPs” and “Baywatch” being two recent examples. However, we had slight high hopes for ‘Six Billion’ due to the director Damian Szifron. But not anymore.
You see, Deadline is reporting that Damian Szifron has been let go from the film that he’s been working on for the last three years. Szifron is the Argentinean filmmaker behind the Oscar-nominated film “Wild Tales,” and was set to make his big-budget American debut with “The Six Billion Dollar Man.” Deadline is reporting that “creative differences” are the cause of the departure, adding that it was perhaps because of a “language barrier.”
Now, without a world-class director, the massive film is in peril of missing its start date. “The Six Billion Dollar Man” was supposed to begin production in two months, but clearly that’s not going to happen. That is unless WB can find someone willing to inherit this mess and run with it. But even though we are now selling big on “The Six Billion Dollar Man,” we are hoping this means great things for Szifron, who might have dodged a bullet.
There’s a long history of foreign directors going for the big payday in the American studio system and having not-so-great results. José Padilha tried to do it with his remake of “RoboCop.” Daniel Espinosa left his promising early directing career to helm the Ryan Reynolds film “Safe House” and hasn’t really been able to escape the studio system. And perhaps the most famous recent example is Gavin Hood, who went from winning an Academy Award for his film “Tsotsi” to directing the utter garbage that is “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”
What we hope happens now is that Szifron goes back to his roots and does something really original and interesting. Because if history teaches us anything, it’s that directors will get burned when they try to make that jump to the big payday too soon.