Some movies are seemingly cursed, and everything that could possibly go wrong does go wrong. Take, for example, Chaos Walking. Starring Spider-Man and Rey, aka Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, it should be a sure-fire crowd-pleaser. So why has the studio declared it unreleasable?
Chaos Walking is based on a trilogy of books by novelist Patrick Ness. The story takes place on an alien planet called New World, settled by Puritan-like humans who left what’s presumably Earth more than 20 years before the events of the first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go. On this planet, all living beings can hear and see one another’s thoughts in the form of an unrelenting cacophony of images, words, and sounds, which everyone accurately calls “Noise.” In other words, it’s chaos walking.
“What if you couldn’t get away? What if you really couldn’t get away? What if there was no escape?”
As the plot unfolds, a teenager named Todd finds a place where there is no Noise. He flees the male-only settlement of Prentisstown and meets a woman named Viola, which is remarkable, as nobody knew there were any non-males on New World. Eventually there’s a showdown between human settlers and the intelligent native race called the Spackle. In 2016, it was reported that Tom Holland was cast to play Todd and Daisy Ridley was all set to play Viola.
Struggling to get started
Lionsgate grabbed the rights to adapt and produce a Chaos Walking film way back in 2011. At the time, the studio had carved out a lucrative niche for itself as the company that made all the major big-screen versions of super-popular young adult novel franchises. Having already brought Twilight from the bookstore to the multiplex and with the first Hunger Games movie on the way, Chaos Walking seemed like the next logical step.
#ChaosWalking #TomHolland
What is Chaos Walking? | 0:14
Struggling to get started | 1:06
“Unreleasable” first cut | 1:51
Too busy for reshoots | 2:33
Time ticking away | 3:25