After much-publicized problems with the location shoot (the university they were using didn’t want to be associated with the film after all), the remake of Revenge of the Nerds has been shut down by Fox Atomic. Nooo! First New Line shafts Peter Jackson and now this! It’s a bad week to be a guy who has Star Wars bedsheets.
Apparently the delay caused by losing the location wasn’t what killed the film – Fox Atomic honcho Peter Rice just didn’t like the dailies that he was seeing from the shoot. Variety says that Rice felt the film was “too small.”
That’s harsh for director Kyle Newman – it’s not often that a teensploitation film gets shut down for artistic reasons. I mean, I could see getting kicked off a film like this if you’re not making your days or you’re not getting enough usable titty shots, but to be told your movie’s “too small”? Ouch.
Newman best hope that his other film, Fanboys, is not as terrible as the truly atrocious script for it that I read. I know some people who have seen the finished film, but I’ll wait to see it myself before throwing off my cloak of smug prejudice. If Fanboys is as completely awful as its script was, though, Newman will be lucky to get a job directing Comic Book Villains 2.
And by the way, can anyone help me understand this: IMDB lists another movie called Fanboys – actually a short- that was made in New Zealand in 2003. It has the same basic concept of die-hard nerds attempting to see Episode I early, but the New Zealand film doesn’t have a ridiculous subplot where one of the nerds is dying of cancer. Isn’t it odd for two films to have such specifically similar storylines?