I'm probably only going to get to say this once in my life, so here it goes: poor Johnny Depp. The last few years the actor has been working hard to try and get some of his passion projects to the big screen, but he's been running into problems at every turn. The big one, of course, is The Lone Ranger, which is currently in production, but months before the start of shooting Disney slammed the brakes on the project because the budget had inflated to $250 million. What's more, even though they were able to fix some of the budget issues in pre-production, recent reports have said that the production has already seen their costs skyrocket back to the original number. Not helping at all was the recent release of Tim Burton's Dark Shadows, which was not only written off by critics (including myself) but completely demolished at the box office by Joss Whedon's The Avengers. And the bad news just keeps on coming.
Deadline has gotten word from insiders that Warner Bros. is currently pumping the breaks on the upcoming The Thin Man remake, which Depp has been attached to for for years now. The project has not yet been given the greenlight and no actress has been hired to play the Norah, the female lead opposite Depp's Nick, but what's really holding things up is that attached director Rob Marshall (who worked with the star on Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) is looking to move on to Into The Woods for Disney. The site says that Depp is in no rush to get the film made as he is looking to take some time off between projects anyway, but apparently Warners is none to happy with the performance of Dark Shadows, which cost a staggering $175 million to make.
Warner Bros. hasn't been shy about pulling plugs over the last couple of years. They famously shut down a live-action version of Akira twice and hit pause on David Dobkin's Arthur and Lancelot, also over budget concerns.
