MEN IN BLACK: INTERNATIONAL Had Some Behind the Scenes Struggles and Director F. Gary Gray Tried to Quit
I actually enjoyed the first three Men in Black films. The first one is easily the best, but I was looking forward to watching director F. Gary Gray’s Men in Black: International. Unfortunately, the film fell below expectations, and it wasn’t really that good of a movie. I imagine this will be the last Men in Black film that we see get made for a long time.
You’d think that with a cast like Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, and Liam Neeson people would flock to the theater for the star power. But that’s not what happened. Just because you take the two big stars of a major Marvel movie hit like Thor: Ragarork and team them back up as Men in Black agents doesn’t mean the movie is going to do well.
It may come as a surprise to Hollywood, but fans still care about good story, screenwriting, and character development. Unfortunately, this new Men in Black movie was lacking big in those areas. I personally didn’t like the movie. I’m kind of over Hemsworth playing these ditzy comedic characters. He’s supposed to be a seasoned respected Men in Black agent in this movie, but he was just a moronic character stumbling through the adventure while Tessa Thompson’s character, with no experience, just happened to know everything there was to know about anything.
Well, it turns out that there was a lot of behind the scenes drama while the film was in production, and it definitely shows on screen. Apparently the script that Art Marcum and Matt Holloway wrote was really good and everyone loved it, but along the way that all changed.
Gray and producer and old school veteran producer Walter Parkes, who worked on the original films, were butting heads the whole time, and they clashed on the vision for the movie. Multiple sources describe Parkes, “who had final cut on the movie and who had written movies such as the 1980s classic WarGames and the Robert Redford thriller Sneakers, as having a heavy hand in overseeing rewrites not only during the preproduction process but during production as well.”
It’s said that early drafts of the script were “edgier and more timely, tying the story to the current debate surrounding immigration.” It’s explained that at one point “a music group a la The Beatles were to be the bad guys, with four people merging into one villain.”
There was a lot of confusion as the actors were getting new script pages every day, and along the way the more modern sensibilities were being stripped away from the story. Then, of course, Thompson and Hemsworth didn’t help matters when they each hired their own dialogue writers to rewrite things as well.
So all of these different visions of the film and characters were being thrown around while the movie was being shot, and the director wanted to quit because of it! He actually tried to walk away several times, but the studio managed to talk him into staying and riding it out.
The studio ended up having two cuts of the film, which they tested. One by Gray, the other by Parkes, and the studio ended up going with Parkes’s cut. It was explained that “the studio was an absentee landlord. They were nowhere to be found.”
Well, I hope everyone is happy with the outcome. Men in Black: International is the result of a bunch of different creative people and executives having different visions and wanting different things. It’s a shame, because had they just stuck with the original script and the original vision, this might have actually been a good movie!
Source: THR