The greatest movies never made: David Fincher’s ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’
Even though he technically made his feature-length directorial debut on an effects-heavy movie based on a well-known property, David Fincher‘s career has yet to draw him into the orbit of a blockbuster he can definitively call his own.
After all, he’s distanced himself about as far away from Alien 3 as humanly possible, and any other flirtations he’s had with CGI-laden spectaculars have failed to come to fruition. Among the titles he swung by for a cup of coffee are the influential comic book adaptation Blade, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible III, a Star Wars sequel, and Brad Pitt’s World War Z follow-up.
However, none of them are anywhere near as tantalising as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which came perilously close to getting the go-ahead with Fincher at the helm. Unlike those aforementioned what-ifs, the Jules Verne adaptation was crying out for a fresh coat of modern paint that would thrive under the direction of an unmistakable auteur, and a genuine blockbuster remains one of the few things sorely missing from Fincher’s filmography.
Backed by the might of the Disney machine, the remake would have hewed closer to the 1954 flick starring Kirk Douglas than its literary source material, which finds the actor’s harpooner Ned Land thrown overboard during what they believe to be an attack by a giant sea creature, only to discover James Mason’s Captain Nemo piloting a submarine that whisks them off on a fantastical adventure.
When asked what drew him to the project, Fincher made no bones about “the idea of doing a gigantic steampunk science fiction movie from 1873” as the key selling point, which he understatedly described as “kinda cool”. The Mouse House was fully supportive of his vision, too, at least for a little while.
Studio executive Sean Bailey revealed a conversation he had with Fincher, which outlined what he had in store. “To be able to sit down with David and have David say, ‘Look, I’ve never really thought about Disney before, but I really want to try to do my Empire Strikes Back. And I think 20,000 Leagues is the title.'” Bailey would also call the filmmaker’s vision “Fincher-esque, it’s bold, aggressive” to further stoke the fires of anticipation.
The Bourne Ultimatum and Contagion scribe Scott Z. Burns penned the script with rewrites from Seven‘s Andrew Kevin Walker, but the first major setback occurred when Pitt surprisingly turned down the lead role of Land. Undeterred, Fincher named his preferred replacement, only for studio politics to interfere.
Fincher wanted Channing Tatum, but Disney was pushing for Chris Hemsworth. As a result, tensions began to arise. “Once we got past the list of people we could cast as the different characters in the film, once we got past one or two names which made them very comfortable, making a movie at that price, it became this bizarre endeavour to find which three names you could rub together to make platinum,” he said to Little White Lies.
“It became very hard to appease the anxieties of Disney’s corporate culture with the list of names that allowed everyone to sleep at night,” he elaborated. “I just wanted to make sure I had the skill sets I could turn the movie over to. Not worrying about whether they’re big in Japan.” By July 2013, Fincher had officially departed the project, and it sunk back to the depths of development hell.
It’s beginning to feel as though he’ll never get around to taking on a big studio tentpole movie, but it’s a sore one to take knowing that Fincher was excited to take on “a gigantic steampunk science fiction movie” that would channel The Empire Strikes Back, only for disagreements to rip it away from everybody.
