The same Variety article that quietly rebuffed all of the internet rumors about the Justice League movie also gives a release date for Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are: October 16, 2009. Yeah, 19 months from now. That’s a full year back from the original release date, and something like three years after the movie finished principal photography.
The saga of Where the Wild Things Are has been exhausting. The movie finished shooting in December of 2006, and it did a test screening in Pasadena late in 2007. A friend who was there loved it, but other reactions were less positive – kids burst into tears and plenty of people complained that it was too dark and weird. People like executives at Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. Rumors began to spread that reshoots would need to be done due to technical issues – the Wild Things were shot practical as men in suits and the intention was to CGI animate their faces in post, but supposedly that was not working out as well as hoped – but CHUD learned that at least some of the reshoots were going to be because the studio sort of hated the movie and the lead child actor. In the meantime the whole ‘the reshoots are for technical reasons’ spin has continued, but we know the truth. And with the movie being pushed back so far, it’s obvious that Warner Bros is giving themselves plenty of time to rebuild this fucker from the ground up.