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Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland are leads in two of the biggest Hollywood franchises right now, so you could expect nothing but hype when it was announced that they would be starring opposite each other in Doug Liman’s Chaos Walking. The movie has originally set to come out last March, but it’s been delayed to 2020. Bad news is, it looks like Lionsgate is having a real problem trying to get this movie out.
According to the Playlist, the release of Chaos Walking has become a real challenge for the studio, and the project was said to have “turned out so poorly it was deemed unreleasable by executives who watched initial cuts last year, according to current and former employees.”
It’s worth noting that Ridley and Holland in the lead isn’t the only interesting thing about this film. Chaos Walking is based on the hit book The Knife of Never Letting Go with a script from Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind). Add to that you have Liman in the director’s chair—the same guy who was on the helm of Edge of Tomorrow.
I also forgot to mention that the villain is played by Hannibal’s Mads Mikkelsen. You can’t ask for anything better.
When it comes down to it, I think the delay behind Chaos Walking is a result of studio meddling. Kaufman has always been known to be an unconventional writer, and I’m thinking the execs think his take on the source material isn’t going to appeal to the mainstream dystopian YA audience. If you ask me, we already have enough of this genre with the likes of Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Ready Player One, and the Divergent series. I would have trusted Kaufman to come up with something that actually stood out.
For now, reshoots are ongoing, and Holland himself had skipped out on the Avengers: Endgame premiere to get to work on this movie. Fingers crossed Liman eventually makes it work.
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This is the description of Chaos Walking:
From Carnegie Award-winning writer Patrick Ness comes the story of Todd Hewitt who lives on the distant planet of New World-a new hope for humanity until struck by “The Noise,” a virus which inflicts immersive visions of ones’ every thought. The cacophony drives many mad until Todd (Holland) is forced to leave his home and everyone he loves. He makes a hidden, silent discovery: there is a girl named Viola (Ridley), who may be the key to unlocking New World’s many layered secrets. Together, the two unlikely companions are forced on a white-knuckle adventure into an unexplored planet – trying to escape and hide in an environment where all thoughts are heard, all movements are seen -as they both discover the truth about the lives they left behind and the spectacular world they’ve learned to call home.
Chaos Walking is expected to hit theaters sometime in 2020.
