Chaos Walking, a dystopian sci-fi adventure starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, is one of Hollywood’s most notoriously troubled productions. At one point it seemed the film might never see the light of day, but finally, after extensive reshoots, it’s arriving in cinemas in January 2021.
The film is an adaptation of The Knife of Never Letting Go, the 2008 young adult novel by author Patrick Ness. Lionsgate bought the rights all the way back in 2011, but cameras did not start rolling 2017, with director Doug Liman of Mr And Mrs Smith at the helm.
Chaos Walking was originally intended for release in March of 2019, but the production hit a major snag. An unnamed source told the Wall Street Journal that early screenings of the film “turned out so poorly it was deemed unreleasable by executives who watched initial cuts.”
At the time, Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer was optimistic that the project could be saved, and ordered several weeks of reshoots. “We wouldn’t be shooting more if we didn’t think we could make this movie work,” he said at the time, hopeful that things would still come good.
The reshoots were announced in April of 2018, but locking the film’s leads down became a problem, given that Tom Holland was busy playing Spider-Man in various Marvel movies, and Daisy Ridler was hard at work on the new Star Wars trilogy.
The reshoots eventually took place in April of 2019, a full year later, but even then, there was no release date in sight. Yesterday, Lionsgate took to Twitter to announce that Chaos Walking will finally be limping into cinemas on January 22, 2021.
This in itself is not a great sign, as January is considered to be a dumping ground for studio films with low critical and commercial expectations. The most recent example of this is Dolittle, which landed with a thud last month after an infamously troubled production.
Chaos Walking, which also stars Cyntha Erivo and Mads Mikkelsen, is set in a world where “all living beings can hear and see one another’s thoughts in the form of an unrelenting cacophony of images, words, and sounds”, called ‘noise’.
That sounds wild, but I guess we’ll have to wait until next January to see how it all turns out.
