LOS ANGELES—Big-screen casualties from the Hollywood writers strike mounted further Tuesday as movie studios reported postponing two more films, one starring Johnny Depp and another with Penelope Cruz and Sophia Loren.
Warner Bros. said Depp's adventure drama Shantaram, which was slated to begin shooting in India in February 2008, has been put on hold due to "strike-related script issues."
The Time Warner Inc.-owned studio said the inability to guarantee a February start date threatened to push production of the film into India's monsoon season.
Another high-profile feature production delayed by the 15-day-old strike is Weinstein Co.'s Nine, a musical adaptation of the Frederico Fellini classic 8 1/2 to be directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall and starring Cruz, Loren, Javier Bardem and Marion Cotillard.
The independent studio said filmmaker Anthony Minghella was unable to finish a script polish before the strike began, forcing production to be delayed from March 2008 to the second half of the year. Originally scheduled for a 2008 holiday season release, Nine is now expected to open in 2009.
The delays bring to at least four the number of feature film projects derailed by the strike, which began Nov. 5 after contract talks between the Writers Guild of America and major film and TV studios collapsed.
The two sides agreed last Friday to return to the bargaining table on Nov. 26, but the union's 12,000 members remain on picket lines for now, with a major rally and march down Hollywood Boulevard planned for later Tuesday.
First TV, Then Movies
The impact of the strike, the first to hit the major film and TV studios since a WGA walkout in 1988, was felt first in the TV industry as production on numerous late-night and prime-time shows ground to a halt.
But the studios' film schedule remained largely unscathed until Columbia Pictures announced last Friday it was delaying production on Angels & Demons," a sequel to last year's box-office hit The Da Vinci Code.
Release of that film, reuniting director Ron Howard with actor Tom Hanks, has now been pushed back from Christmas 2008 to May 2009.
On Monday, privately held United Artists said it was postponing the Oliver Stone-directed film Pinkville, a drama about the investigation of the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam starring Bruce Willis and Woody Harrelson.
In the case of all four films, the studios said the delays stemmed from script difficulties complicated by the strike and that each project would eventually go forward.
But the postponements could prove costly for the studios, which schedule their films far in advance and count on big-name stars serving as box-office "tent poles."
Depp, who was Hollywood's top-grossing leading man last year in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, also shares producer credits on Shantaram, adapted from the Gregory David Roberts novel of the same name.
He plays an Australian heroin addict and prison escapee who flees to India, where he reinvents himself as a doctor in the slums of Mumbai. His involvement in organized crime leads him to Afghanistan and the fight against invading Soviet troops.
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