Shankar was just 26 when he had his first breakthrough hit with 2011’s Liam Neeson-versus-wolves movie The Grey. But what gives him even more nerd street-cred is his role as the executive producer of 2012’s Dredd, the big screen reboot of Judge Dredd, the Sylvester Stallone-as-futuristic-cop flick from 1995.
Dredd was a major bomb at the box office, making only $35 million worldwide. But it has since become a cult hit amongst the Reddit crowd, who are clamoring for a sequel. Taking advantage of his recent spate of press attention, Shankar — who dresses like he lives inside his own The Crow fan film — recorded a video inside his poorly lit office to explain why a follow-up to the Karl Urban-starring flick will be so hard to achieve.
Basically, as with everything else in Hollywood and life in general, it comes down to money.
Shankar — despite his somewhat comedic goth appearance and prominently placed Machine Gun Preacher poster — offers up a solid, easy-to-digest lesson about the difficulty of putting together the budget for independent films. As he explains, producers without the benefit of rich benefactors have to stitch together money from selling the distribution rights to the film in various territories. Distributors make their best estimate of what the movie would be worth in their market, based on the actors, director, and intellectual property involved.
He uses some big stars to make his point, explaining that an independent movie directed by David Fincher and starring Leonardo DiCaprio would be way more valuable than a movie starring Karl Urban and directed by a lesser-known director — especially since the Dredd brand isn’t particularly strong with the non-Reddit crowd.
"At its previous budget level, Dredd lost almost every distributor money,” he explains. “So there are really three options here: One, lower the budget… Two, bring on a filmmaker who would really move the needle, like a David Fincher, and that’s not realistic, it’s not going to happen. Major filmmakers really aren’t in the business of directing sequels to somebody else’s franchise. And three, a movie star.”
If he was to somehow get The Rock to join the franchise, Shankar suggests, that could change everything, since The Rock is beloved around the world, and the international distribution pre-sale generally accounts for 60-to-70 percent of a film’s budget. It’s not a perfect system, since international distributors (much like Hollywood studios) try to dictate the script of a movie, but it’s the only way that most indie films get made nowadays. Unless you have an Ellison as a producer, that is.
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Source-Yahoo
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