Robert Zemeckis Eyeing The Nutcracker 3-D?
Robert Zemeckis is a director who was once mentioned alongside visionaries like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, having directed such blockbusters as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump and the Back To The Future trilogy. He certainly earned that reputation, but lately his career has taken a strange detour into the realm of motion capture technology, where his focus seems to be exclusively on taking existing stories and putting them on the big screen in a new way. Certainly Spielberg and Lucas have been big on pushing technology forward as well, but is Zemeckis letting his desire to pioneer get in the way of making good movies?
His latest film A Christmas Carol hit theatres just last weekend and the reviews haven’t been so hot, but that hasn’t stopped him from lining up another Christmas movie to immediately follow it. According to Pajiba, Zemeckis wants to use motion capture to retell the Christmas classic The Nutcracker. The movie would be based on the E.T.A. Hoffmann novel, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, and set in 19th century Russia. And yes, of course it will use his patented performance capture technology, and will likely be released in 3-D.
Zemeckis is also developing a 3-D remake of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, and is producing a motion capture fantasy adventure called Airman, so apparently he won’t be giving up this new format anytime soon. What do you think, is it a good thing that he is using these projects to perfect this new technology? Or is Zemeckis wasting his talent by choosing to direct uninteresting films?
Comments (6)
I will say I don’t hate the motion capture stuff. I’m all for new ways of telling stories. But I won’t deny that I do feel the stories Zemeckis is choosing to tell, I don’t find much interest in. i’d rather the man go and tell original stories then continue to adapt. If this is the format he wants to use then that’s fine. The tec will get better. But I didn’t need another version of a Christmas Carol, and I don’t know how exciting a new Nutcracker would be.
Posted by Jurassicalien on November 12th, 2009He has mentioned that if there is a Roger Rabbit sequel, it’ll have some motion capture in there somewhere.
Posted by Captain N on November 12th, 2009End This! fail!
Posted by Hugo Van Nor on November 12th, 20093d sucks and I never found Zemeckis that talented anyway, more of a hack (maybe just excluding Roger Rabbit) if you ask me
Posted by AlexG on November 12th, 2009OK, here’s what I think in a nutshell–
I support Zemeckis’ innovative experiments, 100%.
I do NOT like his movie choices 100%
If only Zemeckis could write an original script, he can make it as imaginative and mind-blowing as he wanted, making it perfect for performance capture.
Posted by Ken on November 13th, 2009Yellow Submarine and Nutcracker, on the other hand, are very poor stories to develop this technology. First, Yellow Submarine was a 2D animated cartoon, and has no business being in realistic CGI. Nutcracker, whose main character is a RAT and a wooden figurine CAN’T be humanly expressive because a rat and a wooden figurine are not humans!
……….. Oh well, maybe Airman will be good.
More 3D O’what’joy!
Posted by jaime on November 13th, 2009Leave a Reply