Tagged: Harry Potter

Nikkie Finke broke the story this weekend that Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke was not being invited back to make the sequel New Moon. Summit Entertainment quickly assured Deadline Hollywood that "Catherine and Summit have agreed to part ways on the sequel because our visions are different." In other words, Summit didn’t like Hardwicke.

The news breaks as Hardwicke and the teen cast is touring Europe to promote the blockbuster so the timing could have been better.  It also comes after Hardwicke cleanly broke the ranks and became the female director with the best opening weekend.

A source told Finke, "Summit didn’t like her. They’re saying the DP [director of photography] Elliot Davis is the one responsible for the film’s sumptuous visual look, that the editor Nancy Richardson had to save the film in post-production, and Summit thought Hardwicke’s [CAA] agent Beth Swofford was alternately ineffectual and hysterical. It certainly demonstrates, while CAA agents boast of their vast influence, how little clout and muscle they actually have, or are willing to use, to protect their artists."

New Moon is on a crash schedule to be ready for 2010 release and the third film in the series, Eclipse, is being considered for back-too-back shooting to contain costs and keep the cast looking eternally youthful. The sequel is expected to be more than twice as expensive given the special effects needs and cast salary raises.

The film continues to perform well at the box office despite a critical drubbing not dissimilar to the first Harry Potter film, which actually benefitted from a change in director.

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Emma Thompson has told MTV she’s ditching Hogwarts for her London job.  When confronted with a scheduling conundrum, reprising Professor Sybil Trelawney in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or shooting the second of the Nanny McPhee films, she had to make a choice.

“I’m making my own Nanny McPhee next year,” she declared. “They mean much more to me.”

Thompson wrote and starred in the 2005 film, based on Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda novels.  She always envisioned the project as a trilogy and the second film was well along before Potter’s two-part adaptation of the final J.K. Rowling novel was determined. 

“The working title is Nanny McPhee and The Big Bang,” she said. “It’s not a sequel, actually, it’s a new story.

“[The second film] is set one hundred years later; the only thing that is the same is Nanny McPhee. It’s about two families: A family of country children, and a family of town children, [both] during the war. So it’s about evacuees, and the father is away at war. So this time, the lone parent is the mother. That’s what it’s about: The big war, and a war between these two sets of extremely different children.”

“The Harry Potters are great big franchises that are something I’m not emotionally attached to or necessarily particularly creatively attached to,” Thompson said. “That’s more like doing a turn, whereas the Nanny McPhees are something I’ve written. The art is in those films, they’re very handmade, they’re something that’s very close to me. Those are the ones I really care about.”

No word on who will replace the actress for the films.