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Saturday
09May2009

'The Wolfman' Tacks On Last-Minute Action Scenes

DateSaturday, May 9, 2009 at 12:31AM
When Universal moved The Wolfman from a curious spring opening to a closer-to- the-target November 6th release (why not before Halloween?), it made financial sense. It looked even smarter when the studio filled that vacant slot by moving Fast & Furious into April as that film went on to gross $70 million in its opening weekend.

So we won't see this update of the classic monster movie starring Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt, and Anthony Hopkins on November 6th now, and the party line was that the marketing wasn't quite up to speed in time, prompting a six-month delay. But Dark Horizons learned differently this week, when veteran stuntman Vic Armstrong mentioned at a BFI event that he was currently working on a new scene for the film...after its original release date.

After saying nothing about the revised shooting schedule prior to this news, Universal is now copping to the re-shoots. "The Wolfman is currently in a short production period at Pinewood Studios to shoot a couple of additional sequences. Vic Armstrong is acting as second-unit director and contributing to stunts as well."

Sounds to me like there's too much of that boring story stuff in The Wolfman, and now we're getting a couple action scenes to punch it up. It's a bit like drowning a lead singer in reverb to make the projected hit single sound a little more lively: It doesn't make the melody any better, and therefore doesn't really improve the song, but at least people have something else to focus on.

Additional action scenes almost never add to the story, so if The Wolfman is boring, it's stil going to be boring, just not when those new action scenes are shown. That's a shame, because I did have high hopes for it. Of course, it could be that the film works perfectly fine and that the new scenes are an overreaction to test audiences not connecting with the movie. The irony there is how wrong test audiences are a fair chunk of the time.

The only thing worse than adding scenes that don't make the movie better is adding scenes that make it worse. Let's hope that doesn't happen here.

AuthorColin Boyd | | in , , , , | Print ArticlePrint Article | | Comment2 Comments |

Reader Comments (2)

They were filming shots for this movie as late as this weekend, they were shooting in the hotel i was staying at in Holburn, London.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterRob

instructively povestvuesh , onward to continuing.

Sunday, September 20, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterSokeentitMeli

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