He’s not broken into the commercial feature film game with the blockbuster power of a Bay or a Snyder, or with the darkly artistic bent of a Fincher, but Mark Romanek has still made an impression as a music-video-turned-feature director on the rise. A slow rise —One Hour Photo was 2002, putting 8 years between that and the beautiful Never Let Me Go— but a rise nonetheless. The director may finally be breaking through, if he takes on this Disney gig directing Cinderella for the studio eager to make some of that Alice in Wonderland dough again.
Of course Romanek has flirted once with the studio system before, as he spent sometime on the most recent The Wolfman project before it fell victim to a producing clusterfuck that was a debacle, even by Hollywood standards. With good sense, Romanek walked. This project, picking up on a script sold to Disney last year for big money, will obviously be a bigger machine for Romanek to be engaged in, but with that machine comes much more distinct studio vision and drive behind the project. Cinderella at Disney isn’t something that’s going to be jerked around.
A Cinderella film is obviously not a project I’m going to get immediately excited about, but hiring Romanek will definitely ensure I keep an eye on it. The director has a penchant for melancholy beauty, and while that will certainly not drive the entire film, I can imagine he could pull some stunning moments out of this fairy tale.
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4 comments
I was going to write an entirely different angled article on this titled “Disney stupid enough to think that Mark Romanek will see Cinderella project through to the end.”
touché
I’m mad at him for Wolfman. I really wanted that to be good. Plus, having met him, he doesn’t seem like the type to play ball with any studio on any level creatively. Don’t see this happening.
I’m still waiting for One Hour Photo to hit blu-ray, preferably in Director’s Cut form. After that happens, I will start being excited for the next Romanek project, especially ones that will actually happen.
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