You can say this for “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” one of our favorite punching bags this summer — it looks, sounds and feels like the work of a man with a singular vision, Mr. Michael Bay. The other ghastly, terrible summer blockbuster —”X-Men Origins: Wolverine” — looked and felt like it could have been made by a contest winner. Unlike Bay, that contest winner is also an Oscar winner. Gavin Hood must be smarting from a painful graduation to Hollywood. After directing the really-not-very-good Johannesburg-set “Tsotsi,” he moved on to the seen-by-no-one torture drama “Rendition” before being tabbed for the “Wolverine” gig, only to fight back specious rumors that he was losing a wrestling match with Fox exec Tom Rothman and watching from the sidelines as reshoots were being conducted by Richard Donner.
Now that the DVD is set for release, Gavin Hood is doing press on the film, and when asked about a sequel, the poor guy is left hanging. Hood is noncommittal, saying, “I don’t even know if I would be involved. Right now I’m not attached. Nobody’s attached. They’re developing a script and we’ll see where everybody is. I’m hoping to be shooting something next year and I don’t think that ‘Wolverine’ will be ready for next year. I haven’t been approached one way or another. The studio is obviously very cautious. They want to see how Wolverine does on DVD. Let them develop the script, let’s see what the script looks like, let’s see how the studio feels about the script, how Hugh feels about it and then we’ll take it from there.”
Seeing as how a potential Wolverine sequel has to be in some sort of development at this point (Fox is routinely slow in their franchise development, but a massive undertaking like that would have to be underway by now), the fact that Hood hasn’t been approached with story ideas suggests its good riddance to the helmer of the year’s most incompetently directed studio film. He also notes that “no one” has been approached (not true- Hugh Jackman is obviously still involved, and Chris McQuarrie has been hired to pen the script), which suggests that while he’s out of the loop, he does understand that a sequel is no sure thing.
The film so far has sold $363 million worth of tickets worldwide, which is more than $100 million less than the last “X-Men” picture, but with a (reported) budget of $150 million, an ad budget that had to have been in excess of $100 million, not to mention a boatload of bad notices and controversy that resulted in the loss of a major Fox employee (Rhodes scholar Roger Friedman, who openly admitted to downloading the workprint), the studio has to be a bit conflicted. The numbers say the X-franchise remains robust, but is another $200-300 million expenditure worth it for that much of a headache?
Whatever headache this entails, it won’t involve Hood, who has no upcoming directorial projects in development. We are wearing our Surprise face.