In the computer and gaming industries it is called “vaporware” when a software product is endlessly delayed or canceled entirely. In Hollywood it’s considered just another day. Even in that wasteland of discarded projects though, few get talked up for so long by such important people as Spielberg’s Lincoln, starring Liam Neeson.
However, even if one day Steven Spielberg rolls cameras on an Abraham Lincoln biopic, Devin can still fire up another Movies That Never Were piece, because the other half of the dream equation, Liam Neeson, is no longer attached to the project. The news comes from an interview with GMTV (which I couldn’t dig up on their site) care of Digital Spy.
“I’m not actually playing Lincoln now. I was attached to it for a while, but it’s, now I’m past my sell by date.”
Spielberg is gearing up to roll cameras on Saving Private Equus and once that’s released next year, he literally has something like 3 dozen projects he’s attached to and could start on. Even if Lincoln somehow emerges from that orgy of in-development films as Spielberg’s next project, it’s the opposite of likely that Neeson will be a part of it, if he’s already speaking that definitively.
This is, of course, a toss away quote and much stranger things have happened than an actor reversing his stance on a film, but with all of the other development problems the film has had, I think Neeson’s just telling us what we all already knew.
I guess we’ll always have the Waterston Lincoln.