Every morning Julie Taymor must wake up and wonder what she got herself into.
Just when her already-troubled stage production of “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark” finally looked like it was on track to make it to Broadway, lead actress Evan Rachel Wood has dropped out of the project citing a scheduling conflict.
The production was originally slated to premiere in February before encountering delay after delay. An eye on a late summer preview season and Halloween premiere is now being rumored, though a new Mary-Jane now needs to be cast alongside Reeve Carney and Alan Cumming, who are presumably still on board as Peter Parker and the Green Goblin respectively. It also famously features music and lyrics by U2’s Bono and The Edge, a hint of which we presume can be heard on the production’s official website.
‘Turn Off The Dark’ has also recruited a new lead producer in Michael Cohl, who is taking the reigns from Marvel, Sony and David Garfinkle, a Chicago lawyer who has had no Broadway experience. Much of the production’s troubles had previously been blamed on the producing team’s inexperience.
Financially, the project had been calculated to already be at a heavy loss, with its budget ballooning to nearly $50 million and a weekly cost of around $900k. To put that into perspective, its show at the 1700 seat Hilton Theater would have to sell-out for five years straight for the production to break even.
It’s not known what production conflicted with ‘Turn Off The Dark’ for Wood, but the talented actress will be shooting Todd Haynes’ “Mildred Pierce” adaptation for HBO which stars Kate Winslet and Guy Pearce in April and that might have been it.