He Da Boss
This is a second-hand but reliably sourced story about the currently-shooting Wolverine movie, the upcoming 20th Century Fox tentpoler that's currently being shot by Gavin Hood (Rendition, Tsotsi) and an issue that begs the question "who's really in charge here?" In one corner is Hood, whose once-soaring stock suffered a NASDAQ falloff last year after nobody much liked Rendition, and in the other is Fox co-chairman and CEO Tom Rothman, who's widely known for being a very willful and meticulous micro-manager.
There was/is a huge Wolverine set being recently used. I'm not even sure which lot it was built on, but the look or mood of the set is, according to a source on Hood view of things, supposed to be on the dark, dinghy and somber side. I only know what I was told, but the basics are that Hood was away from the set for whatever reason (shooting something else, taking a day or two off), and when he returned to the big somber set he was shocked to find that it had been repainted top to bottom on Rothman's orders. The murky-scuzzy vibe was gone, and a brighter and less downish look had taken its place.
That's all I know, but at the very least, given my confidence in the source, it suggests that a creative tug-of-war is going on, and that Rothman, one can reasonably gather, feels a certain managerial-slash-territorial investment in the X-Men franchise (the technical name of the film is X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and believes that he, being the big Fox cheese and an inheritor of the spirit of golden-age Fox strongman Daryl F. Zanuck, is more or less entitled to make his own Wolverine calls, whether or not Hood fully concurs.
That said, the situation probably isn't quite as cut-and-dried as suggested by this story. But I do know that Hood was utterly surprised when he got back to the set and saw what had been done.
