Apparently Fox has cut loose the Judge Dredd property, and it’s being shopped around at the moment by Reliance. That’s not a huge surprise, given the Sylvester Stallone film’s crushingly disappointing performance, but what is interesting is that Alex Garland has scripted it. This is the man responsible for The Beach, Sunshine, 28 Days Later and, of course, the aborted Halo script we hear so much about. The budget will reportedly be under $50 million according to Deadline, which really doesn’t seem like a lot to realise such a futuristic environment as Mega City One. But then, despite the millions involved in the last film, sources who were on the production told me a while back that money was so tight and the props so expensive, that if Mean Machine’s fibreglass-constructed arm broke, it would shut the whole production down. Seriously.
That being said, here’s hoping it gets picked up, and Garland knocks it for six. At any rate, he’s probably a safer bet than what would happen under this lot….
Louis Leterrier
Dredd takes on the Angel Gang, who have managed to get their hands on a few poorly-constructed CGI goblins. To escape, he drives his Lawmaster over Mega City One’s walls, making an impossible jump to Brit-Cit. A top name actor stars, and later regrets it for the rest of his career.
Danny Cannon
Following the Rico debacle, the film opens as the Judges invade a meeting of journalists, among whom a few are planning to overthrow the government. All of them happen to be film critics, and the sentence is death. Dredd then strips down to his “Lawmaker Jr” speedos and goes for a dip with Hershey.
Akiva Goldsman
Dredd is a sarcastic, cynical street Judge with a penchant for rubber-nippled ballistic armour, who has a troubled history with his dead wife. All it takes is a strong first act and an increasingly mediocre second and third for him to recover however, and pursue a romance with the inexplicably attractive, yet tough and brilliant, Psi-Judge Anderson.
Guillermo del Toro
Dredd’s ultimate nemesis returns, as Judge Death stalks the streets of Mega City One once more. This time, though, he’s warped reality into a dark and sinister form of Fantasia, where every nightmarish creature looks a little like Doug Jones, only with a hundred eyes.
JJ Abrams
Nobody knew what the film was about before it rolled in cinemas, following a brief presentation of footage to journalists several months before. In the weeks following the film’s release, and hundreds of millions of dollars in receipts later, people slowly start to realise that they still have no idea what it was about.
