18/09/2003

Following continual delays for the new project by Christophe Gans, L’Aventurier, an adaptation of the Bob Morane comic, the whole idea has now been completely shelved. It’s a hard blow for the internationally successful director Brotherhood of the Wolf (which had an audience of 10m throughout the world) who has lost a year-and-a-half preparing the film. And now, he’s focusing his attention on one of his heroes of French comic books, Rahan.

The project for The Adventurer was announced at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival by the producer Richard Grandpierre (Eskwad), whose company was a subsidiary of Studio Canal at the time. It would have been filmed in English, and the budget was set at $32m with the cast including Billy Crudup and Maggie Cheung. The first stoppage was certainly down to the contribution of the SARS epidemic in Asia, which prevented the director going China to do the location scouting. After having decided to move the set to Sri Lanka, the French filmmaker finally threw in the towel when the funding started to be affected by delays and the actors started becoming interested in other films.

This decision also fits in with the new strategy of the president of StudioCanal, Frédéric Sichler: to have a legal separation from its three subsidiary production companies (Les Films Alain Sarde, Alain Goldman’s Légende Entreprises and Eskwad di Richard Grandpierre), but it will be maintaining a privileged status with the three firms.

The future for Christophe Gans now seems to be wrapped up in the making of Rahan, which will be his third feature length film, and it appears that actor playing the main role may already be in place: Mark Dacascos (Crying Freeman, Brotherhood of the Wolf). The film will be co-produced by Xilam Animation.

(Translated from French)