Unfortunately back when Stardust was set to hit theaters here in the States back in August director Matthew Vaughn was supposed to be in town here in Seattle for interviews. Such as it is, Seattle gets the shaft and Vaughn never showed up so I have still never met the director behind Stardust, Layer Cake and now the upcoming comic adaptation Thor for Marvel, which is what we are talking about today.
The UK’s Guardian occassionally offers up their pages to outsiders and on this such occassion they gave an opportunity to Matthew Vaughn who took the time to write about a week that culminated in a showing of Stardust at Sitges. He says a couple of classic lines about how movie premieres have turned into a hot bed for “the new breed of celebrity famous for having no talent whatever and full of film industry types hoping that the film will be dreadful.” He seemed pleased his showing “bucked the trend”.
More importantly there is a paragraph discussing the latest draft of the script for Thor, which he was working on with Mark Protosevich. Here is how he put it:
My phone has just rung. Marvel loves the script. The only problem is that it has been costed at $300m and they ask how I am going to reduce it by $150m. I think I prefer being asked what it’s like working with De Niro.
Gotta say, $300 million for a movie out of the gates is a lot considering budgets typically only balloon higher rather than get smaller. How do you cut something like that in half?
Since I don’t read comics I can’t even speculate what would make this film cost so much, but for an entry film into what I am sure Marvel hopes will become a franchise that is a lot of cash. Especially considering it took Spider-Man three films to get that high, and look at what happened to films like Evan Almighty and Superman Returns, which were rumored to have extra large budgets.
