Prince Of Persia, Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer’s big tentpole for the summer of 2009, has just become Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer’s big tentpole for the summer of 2010.
Yes, the Mike Newell-directed videogame adaptation, which started shooting last week in Morocco, has been pushed back by nearly a year, from June 19, 2009 to Memorial Day weekend in 2010. For those of you who don’t know when Memorial Day is, don’t worry – it’s at the end of May.
The reason for the delay? To finish the thing and to get the special effects absolutely right, which is very commendable. Then again, it’s hard not to sympathise with the caution shown here by Bruckheimer and Disney, for whom the hope is that the Jake Gyllenhaal-starrer will be another Pirates Of The Caribbean-style cash cow.
The move into 2010 takes Prince Of Persia away from Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, which would have opened a week later. In its place, though, Disney has moved up its Ryan Reynolds-Sandra Bullock rom-com, The Proposal – or The Counterprogrammer, as it perhaps should now be known.
It will now open, in 2010, one week after Shrek Goes Fourth, with nothing currently scheduled to go up against it. We must say that it seems strange for movies to be staking out release dates two, sometimes three years in advance, but the stakes are higher than ever these days (God, we sound old), so you can’t blame studios for indulging in what Kurt Cobain would have referred to as territorial pissings (and that reference really makes us sound old).
What do you think, readers? Excited about this? Dismayed that you’ll have to wait another year to see Jakey boy fling himself off buildings and whatnot? Or are you slightly cynical about the reasons for the delay? Vent your spleens below.