What Happened To Brad Bird’s 1906?
News thatBrad Birdmight direct his first live-action film started to bubble upthree years ago. The movie is1906, an account of the San Francisco earthquake as recounted inJames Dalessandro’s novel of the same name. It’s been quite some time since we heard anything at all about the film. Last update fromBird, director ofThe Iron Giant,The IncrediblesandRatatouille, was that he wasstill working on the script, possibly trying to scale it down from $200m status after suits at Warner Bros. balked at theTitanic-style scale of the film.
It’s been a year since we heard anything at all, and now there are distressing rumors that the film may never happen at all.
Blue Sky Disneyhas a long post about the film this week. The bottom line, as the site reports, is the script length and consequent budget:
Things being what they are at studios now — there’s little support for anything that isn’t a proven property — it’s hard to see Warner Bros. being willing to cough up the coin for something on the scale of1906. Bird’s status as a first-time live action director can’t be helping, either. No matter that he’s made a couple of the most successful animated films of the last twenty years. The working methods at Pixar are quite different from how he’d have to work for Warner Bros. Could the unfortunate resonance of the Haiti earthquake be a factor, too? What studio would be willing to greenlight even a highly respectful earthquake movie right now?
Blue Sky Disney says, without any real corroboration for the assertion, mind you, that if the film doesn’t happen this year it likely won’t happen at all. Make of that what you will, but the fact is that this has been gestating forever, with little real result.
