You know you’re working in the bizarre world of Hollywood when your film is delayed even with a name like Cate Blanchett attached to star. Your movie can have everything going for it, but one little shift in the tide and it will be iced indefinitely.
That’s what has happened to Indian Summer, the Cate Blanchett film that Universal Pictures has delayed, ostensibly due to “how challenging the environment for upscale, adult-oriented drama has become.”
Director Joe Wright (helmer of Pride & Prejudice and Atonement) has designed his film to be “an adaptation of Alex von Tunzelmann’s book about the last days of Britain’s colonial rule of India and the symbolic end of Blighty’s status as a world superpower … Blanchett was cast as Edna Mountbatten, wife of Lord Mountbatten, who was the last viceroy of the British Indian Empire and oversaw the country’s transition to independence in 1947.”
There are several reasons why Wright’s film has been put on the backburner. The first is that the studio has deemed audiences uninterested in a $40 million period piece. This seems to not make sense, because Pride & Prejudice and Atonement were whopping successes. However, Indian Summer does lack as strong of an audience hook as those films possessed.
Second came the logistical problems of shooting in India — a setting in which the location would control a large amount of the film’s subject material. Wright said that the film was “in between a rock and a hard place … the Indian government wanted us to make less of the love story while the studio wanted us to make more of the love story.”
While the film has been indefinitely postponed, Blanchett and Wright will be attached for the foreseeable future.
