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Warner Bros. said Depp's adventure drama "Shantaram," which
was slated to begin shooting in India in February 2008, has
been put on hold due to "strike-related script issues." The Time Warner Inc.-owned studio said the inability to
guarantee a February start date threatened to push production
of the film into India's monsoon season. Another high-profile feature production delayed by the
15-day-old strike is Weinstein Co.'s "Nine," a musical
adaptation of the Frederico Fellini classic "8 1/2" to be
directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall and starring Cruz,
Loren, Javier Bardem and Marion Cotillard. The independent studio said filmmaker Anthony Minghella was
unable to finish a script polish before the strike began,
forcing production to be delayed from March 2008 to the second
half of the year. Originally scheduled for a 2008 holiday
season release, "Nine" is now expected to open in 2009. The delays bring to at least four the number of feature
film projects derailed by the strike, which began November 5
after contract talks between the Writers Guild of America and
major film and TV studios collapsed. The two sides agreed last Friday to return to the
bargaining table on November 26, but the union's 12,000 members
remain on picket lines for now, with a major rally and march
down Hollywood Boulevard planned for later on Tuesday. The impact of the strike, the first to hit the major film
and TV studios since a WGA walkout in 1988, was felt first in
the TV industry as production on numerous late-night and
prime-time shows ground to a halt. But the studios' film schedule remained largely unscathed
until Columbia Pictures announced last Friday it was delaying
production on "Angels & Demons," a sequel to last year's
box-office hit "The Da Vinci Code." Release of that film, reuniting director Ron Howard with
actor Tom Hanks, has now been pushed back from Christmas 2008
to May 2009. On Monday, privately held United Artists said it was
postponing the Oliver Stone-directed film "Pinkville," a drama
about the investigation of the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam
starring Bruce Willis and Woody Harrelson. In the case of all four films, the studios said the delays
stemmed from script difficulties complicated by the strike and
that each project would eventually go forward. But the postponements could prove costly for the studios,
which schedule their films far in advance and count on big-name
stars serving as box-office "tent poles." Depp, who was Hollywood's top-grossing leading man last
year in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," also
shares producer credits on "Shantaram," adapted from the
Gregory David Roberts novel of the same name. He plays an Australian heroin addict and prison escapee who
flees to India, where he reinvents himself as a doctor in the
slums of Mumbai. His involvement in organized crime leads him
to Afghanistan and the fight against invading Soviet troops. |
Big-screen casualties from the
Hollywood writers strike mounted further on Tuesday as movie
studios reported postponing two more films, one starring Johnny
Depp and another with 
