The Walt Disney Company has opted to suspend production on all films, be they shooting across the Atlantic Ocean or simply in pre-production in California. The delay comes on the heels of international upheaval in the film industry during the escalating coronavirus pandemic.
Among the biggest delays is director Rob Marshall’s highly anticipated remake of The Little Mermaid. The film, which was apparently nine days away from filming, stars Halle Bailey as one of Disney’s most popular princesses, the aquatic Ariel, as well as Melissa McCarthy as the dastardly Ursula the Sea Witch. The movie was set to begin shooting in England later this month and is still expected to shoot there, although with no public date in mind.
Another major casualty is the Disney/20th Century Studios film, The Last Duel, which saw director Ridley Scott returning to his period epic roots (well before Gladiator, Scott made the highly underrated The Duellists in 1977). The Last Duel, a true story about a 14th century duel between French knights, is an especially endangered casualty as the film was shooting for weeks in France and was scheduled to begin filming in Ireland before the film was put on indefinite hiatus. It is now unclear if Scott’s movie can meet its Christmas Day release date, which signaled its award-minded pedigree since the movie stars Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Ben Affleck, and Jodie Comer, and is working off a screenplay by Damon, Affleck, and Nicole Holofcener.
Another production at the mercy of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, the writer-director’s follow-up to his Oscar winning The Shape of Water. The movie is set up at Searchlight Pictures (formerly Fox Searchlight) and is a passion project for del Toro. Based on a 1947 movie of the same name, the new version stars Bradley Cooper as a con man who teams up with a psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett) to con people into giving them money. Del Toro has been filming for months.
