Metro 2033 film canceled because screenwriter wanted to "Americanize" it

[Armenius]

Looks like author of the novel, Dmitry Glukhovsky, has a tight grip on his creation and doesn't want to see it bastardized by the movie industry.

https://www.pcgamer.com/metro-2033-...ecause-the-scripter-wanted-to-americanize-it/
https://archive.fo/9jlW7

Work on the Metro 2033 film that was announced in 2016 has been halted and the rights have reverted to Dmitry Glukhovsky, the author of the 2005 novel on which the movie was meant to be based. The reason, Glukhovsky told VG247, is that scriptwriter F. Scott Frazier had intended to "Americanize" the setting by moving it from Moscow to Washington DC, and it just wasn't working out. (Which is a nice way of saying that it sounds like it would have been awful.)

"A lot of things didn’t work out in Washington DC," Glukhovsky said. "In Washington DC, Nazis don’t work, Communists don’t work at all, and the Dark Ones don’t work. Washington DC is a black city basically. That’s not at all the allusion I want to have, it’s a metaphor of general xenophobia but it’s not a comment on African Americans at all. So it didn’t work."

"They had to replace the Dark Ones with some kind of random beasts and as long as the beasts don’t look human, the entire story of xenophobia doesn’t work which was very important to me as a convinced internationalist. They turned it into a very generic thing."

So it sounds like they wanted to turn it into some political commentary on the imaginary world Americans live in. Immediately sounds like the author made the right decision.

F. Scott Frazier also has a resume including such wonderful films as xXx: Return of Xander Cage.

"With Metro Last Light and Metro 2033—the books and the games—selling millions and millions of copies worldwide, it’s probably not as improbable now that people would accept a story happening in Moscow because that’s going to be the unique selling point," he said. "We’ve seen the American version of apocalypse a lot of times and the audience that like the genre are educated and saturated and not really wishing to get anymore of that."

Ironic, considering the most successful property under MGM's purview in America is James Bond, which is not about America at all.

Glukhovsky said he's still "optimistic" about a Metro 2033 film being made, and expressed hope that the upcoming release of Metro Exodus will help the process by exposing the series to a wider audience. The new Metro game is slated to come out on February 22, 2019.

Well I'm pessimistic considering the attitude of America-based film production companies and trying to chase that mystical untapped audience by making the source material more "palatable."

 

[Rifter0876]

sounds like a good call for sure, but im sad i was looking forward to it.