It's been a year of highs and lows for live action films over at Walt Disney Studios. While John Carter - despite impressive foreign box office numbers - will likely go down in history as one of the bigger bombs in recent memory (it ended up losing the studio approximately $200 million), Marvel's The Avengers was an astronomical success that has already made over a billion dollars worldwide and currently stands at number five on the all time domestic box office chart. Because of their mixed success, it's understandable that the studio may be a bit more hesitant about some of their upcoming live-action bigger-budgeted projects, and unfortunately for Order of the Seven that hesitation has led to a production shut down.
THR has learned the the project - which was originally developed as a version of Snow White but has since become an original project all its own - has been put on hold as Disney is unsure about putting any more money into it. As reported back in February, Saoirse Ronan was going to play the female lead in the movie, which previously had Natalie Portman attached. Michael Gracey was going to make his directorial debut on the project, with a script recently punched up by Iron Man writers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, and production was aiming to start in the summer, but now it looks like it may not happen.
The situation is similar to one that happened last summer over at Disney when Gore Verbinski's Lone Ranger was forced to hit the breaks. They were, however, eventually able to get the greenlight by slashing their budget from somewhere between $250-300 million down to $215 million. That particular film is now in production with Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer and Tom Wilkinson starring. While exact figures about Order of the Seven aren't available just yet, perhaps they will be able to work something out and get the film ready to start rolling.
