According to Daniel Richtman, before the strike, Oscar Isaac had been offered the male lead role in David Robert Mitchell’s dinosaur 80s dinosaur movie “Flowervale St.” Anne Hathaway is also set to star.
Mitchell is coming off 2018’s “Under the Silver Lake,” an unfairly maligned film that I saw at Cannes, and then it just disappeared.
“Flowervale St” has a budget of $85 million. Richtman describes it as a mystery/thriller with shades of “A Quiet Place”. Hathaway plays a single mom, and they are looking to cast her two kids (12 and 15). Production was supposed to be begin this fall, but it could be pushed back due to the strike.
Back in 2020, MGM announced they had picked up Mitchell’s script, “Heroes and Villains.” This was said to be a “genre-bending” take on superheroes that Mitchell would direct for the studio.
Since then, almost three years later, there’s been total silence on the film. A lot has changed since then, most notably MGM being bought by Amazon. Has the project been scrapped?
Mitchell jumping into the world of dinosaurs is a weird proposition. He’s one of the most promising young directors out there. “It Follows” was a Cannes-championed movie that was one of the best offerings of the horror genre in ages.
A passionate cult following has ensued for “Under the Silver Lake,” with even the creation of a popular subreddit group still trying to figure out the film’s mysteries almost five years since its release. It was a fascinating exercise in atmosphere and tension, and Mitchell is one of the few directors out there who can capture what dreams really feel like.
The initial release for "Under the Silver Lake," had been postponed for a year after the negative reviews greeted it at Cannes. Mitchell is a rule-breaking filmmaker, and his work in that film shouldn’t have been shrugged off the way it did.