Henry Cavill: The U.N.C.L.E. footnote

Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer (as devised by the late Paul Baack)

There has been plenty of coverage how Henry Cavill is being retired as Superman. Some James Bond fans still hold out (the fading) hope the 39-year-old Cavill could still be cast as James Bond. But that may be a long shot at this point.

Meanwhile, this week, the Collider website published an article that The Man From U.N.C.LE. was “the Henry Cavill franchise that should have been.”

Background: Cavill was a late casting as Napoleon Solo for the U.N.C.L.E. movie (filmed in the fall of 2013, but not released until August 2015).

Until Cavill came aboard, the filmmakers envisioned an older Solo paired with a younger Illya Kuryakin. Armie Hammer was cast as Illya first. Eventually, Guy Ritchie took over the project and his first choice was Brad Pitt as an older Solo. For a time, Tom Cruise was in the picture, but he went back to Paramount’s Mission: Impossible franchise.

When Cavill was cast as Solo, the concept of the original series was re-established: Two leads of about the same age.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie was not a financial success. It divided fans of the original 1964-68 television series. Some loved it. Others despised it, saying it was U.N.C.L.E. in name only.

Regardless, there is a “what could have been” vibe associated with all this. We’ll likely never know what could have been.

A sampling of No Time to Die Reviews

No Time to Die poster released Sept. 1.

Hours after the premiere of No Time to Die, an embargo for reviews lifted. What follows are excerpts without spoilers.

PETE HAMMOND, DEADLINE: HOLLYWOOD: “Bond is back with a vengeance, and that means Daniel Craig taking on the assignment just one more time in a film that proves a fitting finale for the actor who invests the role with more emotion, power, and style in a movie that not only marks a milestone as the 25th time around, but also one not afraid to take some twists, turns, and yes, risks.”

STEVEN WEINTRAUB, COLLIDER (TWEET): No Time to Die “is LOADED with everything you expect in a Bond film but also has a lot of surprises. Was on the edge of my seat for like half the movie. You def want to have the events of #Spectre fresh in your mind before watching. Loved Daniel Craig as James Bond. Great sendoff.”

PETER BRADSHAW, THE GUARDIAN: “(C)raig’s final film as the diva of British intelligence is an epic barnstormer, with the script from Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge delivering pathos, action, drama, camp comedy …heartbreak, macabre horror, and outrageously silly old-fashioned action in a movie which calls to mind the world of Dr. No on his island. Director Cary Fukunaga delivers it with terrific panache, and the film also shows us a romantic Bond, an uxorious Bond, a Bond who is unafraid of showing his feelings, like the old softie he’s turned out to be.”

SCOTT MENDELSON, FORBES.COM: “Yes, it’s a better 007 film than Spectre, and yes, it’s a better series finale (relatively speaking) than The Rise of Skywalker, but if anything, the two years of release-date delays may have helped the film. In October 2021, critics and audiences may be so thirsty for water that they’ll drink the sand, and frankly I don’t entirely blame them/us. Had this film opened in late 2019 or early 2020, it would have paled in comparison to other series finales and other ‘take stock in our legacy’ sequels that opened around that time.”

MIKE REYES: CINEMA BLEND: “With a runtime that is nearly three hours, No Time To Die’s story gets off to a rousing start and doesn’t let up. In the run up to its debut, there have been promises that the Daniel Craig era of films was going to have a proper ending, tying together the five movie saga in an epic conclusion. That claim has absolutely been fulfilled, as the usual franchise antics are mixed in with a story that very much has history, especially Casino Royale, firmly in mind.”

BRIAN LOWRY, CNN: “After 25 movies over 60 years, billing a James Bond adventure as the end of something requires a certain leap of faith. Still, Daniel Craig’s yeoman service comes to its conclusion with ‘No Time to Die,’ a big and length-wise bloated epic that includes the desired bells and whistles, which, despite its flaws, should buy the movie considerable goodwill from an audience that has waited (and waited) for it.”

Reports heat up saying Malek will play B25’s villain

Image for the official James Bond feed on Twitter

Just days after picking up an Oscar, Rami Malek is again the focus of stories saying he’ll play the villain in Bond 25.

Variety weighed in with a story saying Billy Magnussen is the top choice to play a CIA agent role while there’s “renewed interest” in Malek as the villain.

Not to be outdone, Collider published a story saying Rami Malek is in final talks to play Bond 25’s villain. It cites “well-placed sources” as the basis of its information. Colllder also says Malek’s representatives have negotiated so the now-Oscar winning actor can do both Bond 25 and a new season of Mr. Robot.

Malek won the best actor Oscar on Sunday for his work on the film Bohemian Rhapsody. He has previously been mentioned in reports as a contender to play the villain’s role.

Each story has additional Bond 25 tidbits.

Variety also said director Cary Fukunaga “turned in” a script draft around the start of 2019. “(W)hile reports surfaced that major rewrite work was done to the script, sources say no significant changes were made, and the producers and Craig were excited with what Fukunaga had delivered.”

The story contained no mention of scribes Neal Purvis, Robert Wade or Scott Z. Burns. The Playlist reported earlier this month that Burns was doing a significant rewrite and was working out of London for four weeks. Purvis and Wade originally were hired in 2017 to work on Bond 25.

“There aren’t really any character details available, though the villain has been rumored to be a blind man,” according to the Collider story about Malek.”

No word whether that rumor stems from the discredited (or at least seemingly discredited) 2017 report in the Mirror that Bond 25 was somehow based on a Raymond Benson James Bond continuation novel. One of Benson’s 007 stories featured a blind villain. The author has said on social media he was never contacted by the Mirror and assumed the 2017 story was a fabrication.

The Collider story references Scott Z. Burns as a writer, but no has mention of Purvis and Wade.

Forster tells Collider he considered quitting Quantum

International poster for Quantum of Solace

Director Marc Forster, IN AN INTERVIEW WITH THE COLLIDER WEBSITE, says he considered quitting Quantum of Solace before the 2008 007 film went into production.

“Ultimately at that time I wanted to pull out,” Forster told Collider’s Adam Chitwood. “Ron Howard pulled out of Angels & Demons which Sony was about to do and they sort of shut down, and at the time I thought, ‘Okay maybe I should pull out’ because we didn’t have a finished script. But everybody said, ‘No we need to make a movie, the strike will be over shortly so you can start shooting what we have and then we’ll finish everything else.’”

The director said he and star Daniel Craig essentially wrote the movie. He also described to Collider the pressure he was under doing a follow up to the well-received Casino Royale: “Then ultimately you have a follow-up with an incomplete script based on no book and you have to deliver.”

In the end, Forster told Collider he had to make a “sort of like a 70s revenge movie; very action driven, lots of cuts to hide that there’s a lot of action and a little less story.”

There’s an element here of “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” To bring this up is like saying Ranse Stoddard didn’t really shoot Liberty Valance. But here goes anyway.

In a 2008 STORY ON THE ROTTEN TOMATOES WEBSITE, Forster played down the Quantum script problems.

The Writers’ Guild strike, which began just as Quantum of Solace was gearing up for production, did not impact the production as much as the industry trade papers had speculated. “The good thing is that Paul (Haggis) and I and Daniel all worked on the script before the strike happened and got it where we were pretty happy with,” Forster said. “Then we started shooting and the only problems I had with the script we were shooting in April, May and June so as soon as the strike was over we did another polish with someone and it worked out with all this stuff coming up. So I was pretty happy with all the work we’d done in January and February so [there won’t be any need for reshoots].”

Also, it was reported during production of the movie scribe Joshua Zetumer was doing rewrites during filming. In the Rotten Tomatoes story, Forster took credit for hiring Zetumer.

Regardless, Zetumer didn’t get a credit for the movie. That went to Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.

The “Forster and Craig really wrote Quantum” narrative was first offered up by Craig in 2011 interviews. And that story line has more or less taken hold since, with Zetumer’s contributions totally forgotten. Without their on-screen credit, Purvis and Wade would be in the same situation.

To be fair, one can understand Forster not wanting to play up the problems while trying to publicize the film eight years ago. The truth usually takes some time — often years — to emerge. SPECTRE was an unusual case because of the Sony hacks publicized pre-production problems on the 2015 007 film.

Still, there are elements of the “Forster-Craig” writing team narrative for Quantum that are more creative than the finished movie. The Quantum reality is likely far more complicated than that.

Print the legend, indeed.

U.N.C.L.E. movie co-writer talks to Collider about the film

U.N.C.L.E. movie poster

Lionel Wigram, co-writer and co-producer of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie, gave an extensive interview to COLLIDER.COM about the film. It was actually conducted in 2013 during filming. Here were a few things that caught our eye:

He says the relatively tight budget helped: In the summer of 2013, Variety reported the movie’s budget was reduced to $75 million after Tom Cruise opted not to play Napoleon Solo. That’s a quarter of what SPECTRE, the 24th James Bond film, is going to cost.

Wigram told Collider the budget made the movie better.

(T)here was certainly a moment when there was a version of the script which we budgeted was considered to be too expensive by all concerned and we had to do a job of compressing certain scenes, compressing the story to make it work [with the budget]. What I found was that creatively it worked better too, which I was surprised by, but sometimes if you’re willing and open to trying stuff, sometimes you surprise yourself and suddenly it all becomes much tighter. Where the centre of the movie was a bit flabby, suddenly the compression made everything move much quicker and gave it an energy that it hadn’t had before. It was a pleasant surprise.

How he and director Guy Ritchie and their production company got involved: Warner Bros. “brought up The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I remembered we both always wanted to do a spy movie so I said, ‘What about this?’” Wigram told Collider.

“This felt different in the sense that this was a 60’s spy movie, and it was two people instead of one. Instead of the lone spy it was two, so that was a good starting point. We thought, ‘What the hell, why not?’ It’s a good excuse to make our version of a spy movie, and it’s a good starting point of a structure.”

(SPOILER) There’s a twist: In the movie, Napoleon Solo works for the CIA and Illya Kuryakin for the KGB. Their bosses “have a little sneaky agenda, they hope to get one over on the other at the end of it, but at least for the time being there’s a temporary alliance and from that comes U.N.C.L.E.,” Wigram said.

Why do an “origin” story: “There’s no backstory in the TV show,” Wigram said. “Let’s give them interesting backstories. How can we give a context to this story, as I said, that’s interesting and has got some meat on it? And this was the best that I could come up with anyway.”

Casting of Henry Cavill as Solo: Wigram told Collider all involved considered an older Solo to entice an established star. “(B)ecause of Man Of Steel, Henry had become that much more of a bankable entity, so the studio was more confident about the idea of us doing it with two young guys.” Cavill was 30 during production and Armie Hammer, who plays Kuryakin, was 27.

There’s a lot more from Wigram. To read the entire interview, CLICK HERE. Also, here’s a shoutout to Henry Cavill News, which spotted the interview earlier and published THIS POST.

Hammer says U.N.C.L.E.’s running time under 2 hours

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. teaser poster

Mild spoiler in the seventh paragraph.

Actor Armie Hammer says The Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie has a running time under two hours.

Hammer and Henry Cavill TALKED TO COLLIDER.COM at CinemaCon in Las Vegas.

“The movie is basically a two hour, or hour, 45-minute version of the trailer,” Hammer said in response to a question from Collider. The movie’s first trailer debuted in February. “The trailer is simply a representation of the movie.”

Both actors said they had seen the final cut of the movie, which will debut Aug. 14.

A running time of around two hours used to be standard for action films. In recent years, some have gone well past the two-hour mark.

This year, Furious Seven had a running time of 137 minutes while Avengers: Age of Ultron weighs in at 141 minutes. Other movies of note: Skyfall, the most recent James Bond film, had a running time of 143 minutes and 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s final Batman movie, came in at 165 minutes.

On the other hand, the U.N.C.L.E. film didn’t have the shooting schedule or budget of such epics. Its principal photography was completed within three months in the late summer and fall of 2013. In contrast, Cavill spent most of his 2014 (with occasional breaks) filming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which is due out in March 2016.

Also, in the interview, the actors described the filming of an action scene, where Hammer’s Illya Kuryakin had to go to the bottom of a very deep pool while Cavill’s Napoleon Solo had to go after him.

To view the Collider story, which includes a video of the 5:16 interview, CLICK HERE.

Our U.N.C.L.E. memo to Mr. Warner

Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer with props that won’t be in the U.N.C.L.E. movie
(Art by Paul Baack)

Updates and corrects to say the almost identical image appeared in Empire magazine.

To: Mr. Warner of Warner Bros.

From: The HMSS Weblog

Subject: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie

According to THE COLLIDER WEBSITE your publicity department released what was described as “the very first” U.N.C.L.E. movie image.

The image? Henry Cavill as Napoleon Solo and Armie Hammer as Illya Kuryakin relaxing with drinks on a terrace in Rome, looking at the camera while Alicia Vikander looks off to the side.

That’s it? It’s almost identical to an image that appeared in Empire magazine and which was posted on sites such as COMIC BOOK MOVIE in August. The MOVIENEWZ SITE, which originally posted in February about the movie, added the image to its gallery of pictures related to the film .

The “official” still is merely photographed from a (slightly) different angle.

We’d be the first to acknowledge, Mr. Warner, your studio faces some interesting challenges marketing the U.N.C.L.E. movie. While it’s based on the 1964-1968 television series, that show has only been seen sporadically in syndication. That means younger viewers haven’t had the opportunity to get exposed to it compared with other old shows such as Star Trek.

Also, one of the aspects about the original show was it was about a multi-national organization where an American worked with a Russian during the Cold War. But others have latched on to that idea.

For example, Kingsman: The Secret Service, coming out in February, turned MI6 of the original comic book it’s based on into a mysterious international organization. It even has a secret entrance similar to U.N.C.L.E.’s.

Your movie, meanwhile, is an “origin” story, focused on Solo and Kuryakin before forced to work together. It’s more like The Man Without U.N.C.L.E.

In any case, Mr. Warner, your marketing department has to build awareness. That “official” still is a little bland. We know, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly in an issue last year that there’s some intense action. We know through your own PRESS RELEASE when the movie was about to begin filming there’s conflict between Solo and Kuryakin. Heck, press photos that came out during production look more interesting that this first “official” still.

There’s still plenty of time to build buzz before the film’s mid-August release, Mr. Warner. Hopefully, the first teaser trailer will attract tension. With the next “official” image release, you may want to consider something that hasn’t already been seen. Good luck.

(Before writes in to say there is no Mr. Warner at Warner Bros., it’s a joke. There hasn’t been a “Mr. Warner” at Warner Bros. since Jack Warner sold the studio in the 1960s.)

John Logan discusses Skyfall with Collider

John Logan, one of the screenwriters of the upcoming Skyfall, told the Collider Web site what it was like to work on a James Bond movie in a spoiler free interview.

A sample:

It happened because Sam Mendes and I have known each other for 15 years from theater circles…. So we had lunch and he said there’s this great script by (Neal) Purvis and (Robert) Wade that existed, but he wanted me to come onboard and I did the ultimate thing you never do which is I said “Yes. I don’t care what you pay me, I don’t care what I have to do, yes,” because I grew up—the first Bond movie I ever saw was Diamonds are Forever, I remember every moment of it. I’m particularly pleased that Skyfall comes out on the 50th anniversary of Dr. No, so for 50 years this franchise has been going incredibly strong through 23 movies, so to be part of that is incredibly fun.

To read the Collider story CLICK HERE. Collider also provides a video of Logan.