In what's amounting to a mass exodus, David O. Russell became the third filmmaker today to leave a major movie twisting in the wind. First Albert Hughes left Akira, then Wes Craven took a break from Scream, and now Russell has abandoned Uncharted, the upcoming movie based on the hit Playstation 3 videogame series from Naughty Dog. The games featured notorious treasure hunter Nathan Drake on globetrotting adventures to steal valuable artifacts for personal gain.
According to Variety, Russell's departure was "amicable and due to creative differences on the project." Great... "Creative differences" again. Just once it would be nice to hear something juicy about this kind of thing. "David O. Russell left the project after the producer ran over his dog. Twice. On purpose." That would be newsworthy. Pity about the dog, though. Whether or not it was naughty.
With Russell gone, Columbia Pictures is understandably scrambling to get the project rolling again. A first draft of the script, written by Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer (who have this summer's Conan the Barbarian coming up), is reportedly something that Columbia is "still very high on," might be scrapped. The production company is reportedly already looking for new writing talent, in a likely attempt to cater the film to whatever new director takes on the project.
The rumored casting Mark Wahlberg, Robert Deniro and Joe Pesci is also now in doubt. While never confirmed, it was rumored that Wahlberg would have joined the film to reteam with Russell, with whom he worked on last year's Oscar-winning The Fighter. Now the stage is once again set for fan favorite Nathan Fillion to take over the role... at least, that's what we expect the internet to start saying any moment now.
Crave Online will be back with more Uncharted news if we can ever find the stuff. Where's that chart again...?
Oh, right.
