November 21, 2004

Saw 2 without original team? - Ermm, no.

Continuing, yet again, on the Hollywood trend of messing up a good potential series, here comes new from MovieHole, read through Coming Soon, that Saw 2 may not include the two creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell.

Already, Lions Gate have greenlit a sequel to “Saw”, but Wan and Whannell are yet to find out how involved they’ll be in it. “[The] Producers are definitely talking about it yeah. We don’t know exactly know what our full involvement is yet. We’d say we’ll be executive producers or overseeing it. It’s only in the early stages so I may have a hand in the writing. The film just opened, so it feels kinda early to be talking about a sequel. From the moment the film opened at 18.3, the sequel gets greenlit the next day. We haven’t had time to think about it. But the producers have had time; they find time to talk about the sequel”, Whannell laughs. “I don’t think I’ll be directing [it]”, adds Wan, who wants to move onto directing new projects.

Oh dear. I think this is a common problem throughout many industries, I can actually see this in my line of work and it's nothing to do with Movies, where the budget holders push the project, looking at what they want at the end and at similar projects, pass an amount of money to a pool of technical people who can do the job and expect their ideas to be the result. Wrong.

Your technical people are not just those who deliver what you want, they have expertise of the area and past experience, you should consult them and let them drive the project, with the budget pushers managing the project and looking at figures. Get the creatives on board first, then see what can be made.

I think to exclude these two from the follow up to their winning movie is a failure. Just as equally though, we have seen Hollywood budget remakes or follow ups to existing cheaply made movies by exactly the same teams fail, I think it's just weighting the odds against it not to include them. Madness.

We can hope that they haven't been included to date because the Producers are sitting organising budgets and deals to be in place in order to secure these names. However, we are all realists aren't we?

Update: Just as I checked IMDB for the details of these guys, I see that they are announced on Saw 2. Well done! I was just going to remove this post entirely, but I had a good rant, so what the hell. At least the Producers have done the right thing here!


Posted by Richard Brunton at November 21, 2004 08:43 AM


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