Only recently Harrison Ford raved in the SZ interview that he was getting old “stumbled upon a gold vein of good screenplays”, that’s why he works so much again. One example was the western series 1923, in which he and Helen Mirren play a married couple fighting over their ranch in Montana. Series creator Taylor Sheridan created a prequel to his hit series “Yellowstone” and told the history of the rancher family Dutton around Kevin Costner.
According to the industry magazine deadline it could now be over after just one season with “1923”, the shooting, which was supposed to start in early June, was suspended “indefinitely”. The obvious reason is the strike by screenwriters in Hollywood, which the Writers Guild (WGA) called for in early May. With that, the “gold vein of good screenplays” suddenly came to an end – if you want to write in Hollywood, you have to be a member of the Guild.
Another victim of the strike could be a long-awaited major project, the American series adaptation of Fritz Lang’s silent film classic “Metropolis”: Sam Esmail, inventor of the series “Mr. Robot”, has been working on this heartfelt project for seven years – but that too has now become loud deadline put on hold. In addition to the writers’ strike, sharply increased costs are said to be the reason that the Apple TV+ streaming service has pulled the emergency brake here.
An end to the strike is currently not in sight, and further major production losses are to be expected. When the WGA went on strike in 2007 and 2008, an agreement could only be reached after about a hundred days – the economic damage caused by the production losses was estimated at more than two billion dollars at the time.