‘Tis a strange and intriguing situation over at the MIB headquarters nowadays. In case you haven’t been following the laughable catastrophe thus far, let’s sum it all up swiftly: Sony Pictures willingly started production on the film with only one third of the screenplay complete. Supposed reason for this was so that they could benefit from New York City’s tax incentives, which they feared would expire at the end of last year. That didn’t happen, but their problems were soon staring them in the face: They needed more script! Whoops!
Cut to now. Alec Baldwin has left the production because of the delays, Tommy Lee Jones doesn’t even know what the movie is about, and producer Walter Parkes and director Barry Sonnenfeld are supposedly in a feud. Now a new wrinkle: Will Smith’s longtime collaborator, Mike Soccio, has now joined up, becoming the fourth (known) writer to toil on the screenplay, after Etan Cohen, Jeff Nathanson and David Koepp. The latter two writers are well-regarded script doctors in the business, so if they can’t get things moving forward, you know it’s a clusterfuck.
Soccio is an interesting case because evidently he’s Will Smith’s go-to scribe; the two go back as far as “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” It would appear as though Soccio’s contributions to the MIB III script have been so under the radar that some of the other writers didn’t even realize he was working on the thing, or at the very least, aren’t aware of the extent of his contributions… No wonder this movie is a fucking mess.
Production is apparently underway again, after a prolonged hiatus to fix the troubled screenplay. It remains to be seen just what direction the movie is going in now, although I gather that the time travel subplot is still intact. One thing can be assumed: It’s going to be a glorious mess when it comes out, which is still scheduled to be during next May. This is like the SPIDER-MAN MUSICAL of movies…
MIB III star Alice Eve