So the James Cameron-produced Fantastic Voyage project now has Night at the Museum/Date Night auteur Shawn Levy in the director’s chair. And…yeah. According to Mike Fleming at Deadline, Cameron met with a whole bunch of other people, including Timur Bekmambetov, Louis Leterrier, Jonathan Mostow, and even Darren Aronofsky. Obviously, they settled, but I thought Fox might be on the verge of letting not mediocre directors work on high profile projects.
Either way, Levy’s probably going to attract a whole mess of incredible talent to fill out his Voyage cast, as he gets incredibly talented people to be in his just okay films. Sad day.
While this has absolutely no bearing on the story above, nor should anyone really care, but every time I hear of Shawn Levy, I’m immediately taken back to a sleepy afternoon of watching FX. Night at the Museum happened to be on and FX was doing their DVD on TV deal with it. On one of these segments, Shawn Levy comes on and talks about improvising a stunt with Ben Stiller where a tyrannosaur skeleton throws Stiller’s character down some stairs. Perhaps my memory is wrong, but I recall Levy thinking that it was the most incredible thing in the history of all cinema, that you can deviate from the script. I kind of just sat there perplexed. He came off fairly full of himself, thinking he was the next great director, and that’s on an edited down, Fox approved special feature.
Oh, well. Discuss below.