The $188m Apple TV+ remake of Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi classic Metropolis has been cancelled.
The major project was in pre-production in Melbourne when NBCUniversal’s Universal Studio Group announced the eight-part series would not go ahead.
The cancellation has been blamed on the US writers’ strike because drafts of the scripts had not been finished before the start of the strike in May when the Writers Guild of America walked off the job over falling rates of pay.
“Push costs and uncertainty related to the ongoing [US writers’] strike led to this difficult decision,” UCP said in a statement, first reported by Deadline.
The series, directed by Sam Esmail, had cast Briana Middleton and Lindy Booth in major roles, but few other details were initially available.
Metropolis is considered by many critics as one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, dealing with themes such as class conflict, industrialisation and the perils of mechanised modernity.
The Guardian film reviewer Peter Bradshaw called it “a crazed futurist epic” and a “dystopian nightmare about a city-state built on slave labour, whose prosperity depends on suppressing a mutinous underground race whose insurrectionist rage is beginning to bubble”.
The project had been attracted to film at Melbourne’s Docklands Studios by funding incentives from Australian state and federal governments.
The Victorian government and the federal government chipped in $41.6m and $83.8m respectively in location incentive funding for a number of projects from NBC Universal’s UCP including Metropolis.
The Victorian government says it is “disappointing” it won’t go ahead but the $41.6m incentive fee had not been paid yet.
Under location incentive funding, the final payment is only made once final Australian expenditure is incurred on the production.
The federal location incentive program and the Victorian government’s screen incentive scheme boasted that they had attracted “one of the most technically ambitious film and television projects ever to film in Australia”.
The government said the projects would contribute up to $621m in direct spending over five years; provide work to 700 cast and crew; employ 2,500 people directly on Metropolis and see 700 local businesses and service providers benefit.
In 2021 a Netflix series with $10m in incentive funding, Melissa McCarthy’s God’s Favorite Idiot, was axed after only half of the series finished shooting.
Metropolis and God’s Favorite Idiot were enticed to Australia through the incentive program, which allows overseas productions to recoup up to 13.5% of production expenses incurred in Australia.
“While the withdrawal of any production is disappointing, Victoria’s partnership with NBCU remains in place with a significant estimated expenditure to be delivered over the coming years,” a VicScreen spokesperson said. “The funds initially earmarked for Metropolis will be allocated to another project or projects to be delivered through the partnership.”
Part of the deal included the Victorian government contributing $12.5m to the cost of building a virtual production facility at Docklands. VicScreen says the facility will be used for other productions and education and training activities.
A spokesperson from the department of the arts said no payments under the location incentive scheme have been made to the production because principal photography had not started.
