The status of David Fincher’s HBO projects seems to be a mystery wrapped in an enigma and deep fried in a batter of the Colonel’s secret recipe. That’s what the Hollywood Reporter has said following HBO’s presentation at TCA, pulling programming president Michael Lombardo aside and asking him to get to the bottom of Fincher’s highly anticipated work.
Lombardo notes that Fincher is a hands-on guy when it comes to his work, not wanting to share the load on his projects while he’s off working on one of the other ones. That’s where the delay for Video Synchronicity seems to come from and luckily, it doesn’t seem to be the end of the road just yet:
Video, he said, “isn’t dead,” despite being out of production for nearly two months.
“When we both saw the third and fourth [episodes], we realized we needed to go back and do some work on the scripts,” Lombardo said. “David’s attention at that point — he is someone who likes to be hands on, on everything — got diverted by another project [HBO’s Utopia]. [He’s] not good at letting us go ahead and do what we needed to do on Video Synchronicity while he was working on Utopia. I texted with him today, we’re going to turn our attention soon back to Video Synchronicity and figure out the path forward. But I fully expect we’re going to be able to finish that up.”
And what about Utopia? That is the more high profile and interesting project for Fincher on the network, especially with the involvement of Gillian Flynn on the writing side of things. If you haven’t seen the original version from the UK, seek it out. It isn’t the perfect show, but it does conspiracy and thrills the way that something like Wayward Pines or any number of Syfy shows would love to do. And now it seems like it is dead on arrival:
As for Utopia, Lombardo admitted that HBO is “struggling right now trying to figure that out. Sources tell THR that Utopia — which is rumored to have cast Rooney Mara — is way over budget. “We’re at that moment, trying to figure out if there is a path forward or not for Utopia.”
This is definitely the most disappointing bit of news to come out of TCA. If Utopia doesn’t happen, I kinda feel like that’s a loss for something that was meant for great things. Here’s hoping that HBO and Fincher can figure things out to make it work.
(Via the Hollywood Reporter)
