Hollywood Math: When 300 Becomes 2

By Steven Zeitchik

A "low-budget effects movie" sounds like something you attempted with your cousin Tommy in the basement of his house on Long Island circa 1985, using a few matches and an old car battery to create the exact series of explosions from the last scene of Star Wars.

But low-budget effects is exactly the kind of paradox "300" so effectively pulled off last year, along with concepts like "word-of-mouth commercial smash" and "movies with homoerotic undertones that millions of aggro teenage boys didn't seem to notice."

It's always been a a bit of a mystery why studios didn't push for a "300" follow-up more quickly after Warners' early March release topped $450 million worldwide with little else but a bag of greenscreen tricks. The Hollywood epic is already a time-tested genre, and now that it's appealing even to a quadrant that once might have shunned it, it would seem like a marketing no-brainer.

Well, those waiting on tenterhooks for 300: 2 (600?), toss out your anti-anxiety pills. The producers who brought you that film, Gianni Nunnari and Mark Canton are, like the Spartans and Megarans in the Archidamian stage of the Peloponnesian war, joining forces to come up with a new film. It's called "War of the Gods," it's been snapped up and will be financed by Relativity (and produced by Ryan Kavanaugh), and the hook is that, this time, the gods actually come down to fight.

(This is the logline, by the way: "A purported bastard who retains an allegiance to his mother despite the fact that he longs to join the quest of a king who is battling demons in ancient Greece later embarks on a grail of discovery that has him finding he is the king’s son and also fated to become his country’s greatest hero as he leads the successful war against long-imprisoned Titans who are hoping to use the demons to restore their power.")

Anyway.  

It all seems like an eminently commercial idea, and for all its techno-wizardy, in many ways it reps the kind of epic storytelling purists complain Hollywood doesn't do much of anymore.

Only here's the thing: Warners has been working on a similar epic-style greenscreen project. It's called "Clash of the Titans," it has Louis Leterrier already attached, and, well, it's going to be a little tough to release two similar movies going after pretty much the same audience in close proximity.

Warners thought so, because there was even talk at the studio of the company buying the "Gods" project -- whose script was said to be further along -- and swapping in that script for the "Titans" one (but still calling it "Titans").

In the end the studio decided to pass and just go ahead with its own movie, leaving Relativity to make the purchase and fast-track the pic. This won't move at the centennial pace of the Grecian wars (or many studio productions); the company could begin shooting as early as the first quarter of 2009.

So from a post-"300" vacuum to two rival projects battling it out to get to production first, to get to theaters quickest, to position itself as the true follow-up to "300." Now there's an epic battle someone should make a movie of.

Comments

[Liz]

Did you actually get through this entire post without saying "THIS IS SPARTA?" Kudos.