HEAVY METAL Finds Home at Sony

Its not very often to hear a studio willing to produce an edgy animated feature film with mature themes for the R-rated audience so when word got out in March that Paramount is developing another Heavy Metal anthology (the first film came out in 1981), I was quite pleased. Based on a dark sci-fi and fantasy comics magazine of the same name, the film will contain eight or nine segment with each directed by a different director. Much like its past predecessors, there will most likely be bloody violence and sexual content. Director David Fincher is already attached to the project with CG animation provided by Blur, the studio responsible for various intro cinematics in video games and an Oscar nominated animated short. Then in July, Paramount has decided to put the project on hold, citing its "too risque for mainstream audiences". Apparently, that was not entirely the whole story. Kevin Eastman, the co-creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and owner of the Heavy Metal magazine, gave us the lowdown on why Paramount really pulled the plug and where the project has moved.

"We developed it for Paramount in January... And it was time for them to make a decision [about going forward with the project] and they were at odds with Fincher over another project, 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,' [because] they wanted him to reduce the running time... and so they said, 'Until you step up to do what we want you to do with Benjamin, we're not going to greenlight any other of [your] movies.' And David said, 'Fine, f*ck you, I'm going to set up [Heavy Metal] somewhere else,' so we jumped over to Sony and set it up there."

Eastman also dropped a few names of director who express interest in helming one of the segment. These include Guillermo del Toro, Gore Verbinski, and Zack Snyder. What a hell of a line-up if they manage to get all of them onboard. The tentative release date is sometime in 2010.