A sad news has been revealed by The Hollywood Reporter today : the movie that Rose was supposed to start filming this month in Boston, the Spielberg’s produced Haunted, has been shut down by Dreamworks and won’t be filmed soon as the director is now off the project. However, “the studio plans to continue developing Haunted based on the original screenplay by the Hayes brothers.” Let’s hope Rose will still be attached to the project when a new director will be found.
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER – DreamWorks has pulled the plug on Haunted, an under-the-radar movie that was just weeks away from beginning filming. Steven Spielberg and others involved with the project, a ghost tale said to have been inspired by Henry James 1898 The Turn of the Screw, were deeply displeased with a total rewrite of the script by director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and Scott Z. Burns (Contagion). DreamWorks is said to have sunk about $5 million into preparing the film, which had a budget of about $17 million.
The film had been greenlighted based on a script by Chad and Carey Hayes (The Conjuring) and Rose Leslie, who played the wilding Ygritte on Game of Thrones, was recently cast to star. Producing were Scott Bernstein and Roy Lee.
But Fresnadillo, collaborating with Burns, turned in a revision that made dramatic changes — including the title, the characters and the action — so as to render the project unrecognizable, according to sources.
There had been some concern about the choice of Fresnadillo, the Spanish director who most recently directed the pilot Falling Water, which has been picked up by USA Network. His best-known film is 2007’s 28 Weeks Later, which grossed $64.2 million worldwide. But a source says that was only after executive producers Danny Boyle and Alex Garland became extensively involved. Still, Spielberg felt that the director had the skills for the project.
The project, which was to shoot under the DreamWorks label, would have been one of the first new projects to move forward since DreamWorks, Amblin and Participant formed the new Amblin Partners late last year, and Dreamworks, after distributing its movies through Disney since 2008, struck a new distribution deal with Universal.
While Fresnadillo is now off the project, the studio hopes to continue to develop it based on the original Hayes brothers’ script.
