Bummer: David Fincher's UTOPIA and VIDEO SYNCRAZY Dead at HBO

Here's one of the few times we have bad news to report that involves HBO. According to Deadline, director David Fincher and the company couldn't come to an agreement about the size of the budget needed for his American adaptation of the British series Utopia, so Fincher is no longer involved and the project is currently dead. His 1980s music video series Video Syncrazy, which was also set up at HBO and halted production recently,  

Utopia was another collaboration between Fincher and Gone Girl author/screenwriter Gillian Flynn, and I was excited about seeing what they could do on an awesome channel like HBO. The show is about a group of people who are fans of an graphic novel and become embroiled in a conspiracy when they find a manuscript for the sequel. Fincher's Girl With The Dragon Tattoo star Rooney Mara would have toplined the series. Apparently HBO still retains the rights to the show, so they might reach out to another filmmaker to step in and work on this instead of Fincher, but it's a shame we'll never see his version.

Video Syncrazy (or Synchronicity — the title has been in flux for a while) was about a young filmmaker who gets in on the music video scene in the 1980s and was loosely based on some of Fincher's experiences back in those days. The Playlist says HBO has let all of its actors out of their contracts, so this show is "beyond dead" as well, with budget issues and script issues being at the forefront of the problems. For fans of Fincher's work, this sucks to hear; it obviously would have been great to see what he could do in the realm of TV outside of jumpstarting House of Cards on Netflix, but maybe he'll head back to the streaming service to work on some new projects there now that these have fallen through.