When do you just concede that the movie is broken, and won’t ever be fixed?
This is what Universal is faced with when dealing with “The Wolfman,” their long-suffering, big-budget remake that the studio has a lot riding on. Almost from the word “go,” the movie has been plagued by trouble. This came in the form of setbacks, delays (it’s had roughly seven thousand potential release dates), dropouts (with original director Mark Romanek walking off the movie weeks before shooting began and most recently superstar composer Danny Elfman left due to those delays) and a pair of iffy trailers that didn’t exactly sell the movie as the rip-roaring genre yarn that it’s supposed to be.
Well, apparently, two more editors have been brought into post-production to try and get this puppy in fighting (howling?) shape before it’s scheduled to be released Valentine’s Day, but, this being “The Wolfman,” maybe it’ll miss that release date too.
According to Variety (thanks goes out to the oddly optimistic /Film for picking up on this), editors Mark Goldblatt and the legendary Walter Murch have been brought into the fray to replace Dennis Virkler in cutting “The Wolfman.” In Variety’s wording, they’ve been brought into “recut” the movie.
Anyone who cannot see this movie as being a complete lost cause is either delusional or dim-witted (or both). Universal, which has not exactly had a banner year, has a lot riding on this movie. In addition to the untold millions they’ve pumped into it, between the shoot, the reshoots, and all those people they’ve already paid only to have them walk away (like Elfman, who had an entire score ready to go), “The Wolfman” is supposed to kick-start another cycle of Universal Horror movies, with remakes of “The Bride of Frankenstein” (to be directed by “The Illusionist’s” Neil Burger), “The Invisible Man” (courtesy of “Dark Knight” co-screenwriter David S. Goyer) and “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” (for “Sahara’s” Breck Eisner).
If “The Wolfman” bombs as bad as it looks like it will, then all of these movies will be stalled indefinitely, for sure, and the studio will find itself in the same place it was in 2004, when the lackluster commercial performance of Stephen Sommers’ “Van Helsing” canceled similar plans for its all-star monster line-up.
Murch is undoubtedly a brilliant editor (he cut “Apocalypse Now,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and the 1998 re-edit of “Touch of Evil”), and while we hope his considerable skill will help wrangle this out of control monster, Mark Goldblatt is a different story. Yes, he’s a talented editor. Anyone that’s done “The Howling” AND “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” has got skills. But recently he’s become a Stuart Baird-type character who the studios bring in to anonymously cut movies last minute.
Either way: it does not bode well. Clearly, Universal is trying to make chicken soup from chicken shit and we’re betting it’ll be more shitty than soupy. Can somebody just find some silver bullets and put this thing out of its misery? — Drew Taylor