Heavy Metal set up @ Sony

Back in July, I wrote about David Fincher's remake of HEAVY METAL getting dropped by Paramount Pictures and subsequently looking for a home. Well, it seems that it has found one. According to Kevin Eastman - creator of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and publisher of Heavy Metal, the magazine - the project has been set up at SONY. Seems as though Paramount dropped the flick, not because of the content - as was once thought - but because it's currently in a pissing contest with Fincher over the director's new flick, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON. They don't like the length of his cut, they're putting a gun to his head to trim it, they're not letting him get any of his projects off the ground there... Studio politics can suck it.

Here are some Eastman quotes on the matter: "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."

Even more interesting, Eastman throws out the names of a few directors that are apparently anxious to helm segments of HEAVY METAL: Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, Gore Verbinski, and Zack Snyder. I can get on board with that, even if "The Mountain" can't.

No joke: The creator of TMNT is married to B-movie goddess Julie Strain!