The ongoing Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) strike has quite literally been striking down one major production after another since protests began early last month, as thousands of writers continue to picket outside studios nationwide for sweeping changes to working conditions and fair compensation. The monumental impact is being felt everywhere in the industry, and now one of the biggest television projects in decades has been declared yet another casualty. Per a report from Collider, Sam Esmail‘s epic sci-fi series Metropolis is officially dead after ongoing production challenges, the WGA strike serving as the nail in the coffin.
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Metropolis was set as an incredibly ambitious series adaptation of the original 1927 dystopian film of the same name directed by Fritz Lang, considered one of the most influential and groundbreaking films of all time. Set in a dystopian futuristic city, the story follows Freder, the wealthy son of the city’s ruler who becomes aware and empathetic of the plights faced by the working class. He meets and falls in love with a woman named Maria, an activist for the working class, and together they try to bridge the gap to bring a divided humanity back together.
Sam Esmail, whose previous work also includes another popular sci-fi series called Mr Robot (2015) that starred award-winning actor Rami Malek and ran for four seasons, was at the helm of the mega-project as showrunner, writer, and director. He served as its creative mind while both Universal Content Productions (UCP) and Anonymous Content agreed to handle the finances. However, those financial costs grew more and more staggering, and the project began to fall into limbo. Apple TV+ came aboard last year to help ease the burden, and the outlook was instead abundantly positive with filming finally set to begin this summer in Melbourne, Australia. This was also thanks in large part to VicScreen’s Victorian Screen incentive grant and the Australian Government’s Location Incentive. With what seemed like enough cost coverage, Esmail was ready and eager to move forward at last. The series was going one of the most technically ambitious productions ever made, with thousands of jobs created and an unprecedented amount of VFX that would also harness the adoption of LED volumes seen in Disney+’s popular Star Wars series The Mandalorian.
However, reps at UCP pulled back the curtain on what was in truth a growing mountain of issues that made the show’s downfall all but inevitable. Coupled with the still-insurmountable costs was incomplete production drafts of scripts, and the commencement of the WGA writer’s strike meant that no further work could be done on those scripts until the strike ends. As of now, there’s clearly still no end in sight, and all of that has led to the regrettable decision to pull the plug on the entire project permanently.
Metropolis May Spiritually Live On in Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis
While Esmail’s Metropolis will tragically never see the light of day on-screen, there remains a silver lining in Francis Ford Coppola‘s upcoming sci-fi epic film Megalopolis. Also monumentally ambitious in scale, the film has been deemed Coppola’s lifetime passion project, the one movie he’s always wanted to make no matter the cost, literally, that will utilize everything he’s learned over his long career as a filmmaker. It’s reportedly influenced by a number of different source materials, from the Catiline Conspiracy of 63 B.C. in recorded Roman history to various Roman-inspired classic films, to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis film. Coppola’s project follows a relatively similar premise to Lang’s, taking place in New York City after an apocalyptic catastrophe devastates the entire area. An ambitious architect sees a golden opportunity to rebuild the city in his vision as a grand utopia, but the city’s mayor refuses to allow it.
With an absolutely incredible-looking cast and the promise of some of the greatest practical effects of any film in the industry (Christopher Nolan will surely be watching closely), and also using an LED stage as seen above, Megalopolis also reportedly experienced tremendous production costs, at one point apparently spiraling out of control and putting the future of the film in jeopardy with some crew even walking off the set. However, Coppola himself denied those reports but still made a financial intervention, breaking a cardinal rule of the industry and personally financing the gaping hole that was left to bring the film to the finish line. Shooting successfully wrapped and soon enough we’ll be able to see Coppola’s so-called magnum opus feature come to the big-screen in all of its high-stakes glory. While there is no exact date yet announced, the word is that will come to theaters sometime in 2024.
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