Phil Lord and Chris Miller are at it again.
Puck is reporting that Sony will not be renewing its contract with Lord/Miller after parties "endured a heated fight” over the budget of the upcoming Nic Cage led “Spider-Noir.”
The duo signed a five-year, nine-figure TV deal with the studio in 2019, with the idea being that they'd oversee a slate of Spider-Man projects. Sony is coming off comic book box-office bombs, “Morbius” and “Madame Web,” and Lord/Miller were the only creatives to turn in acclaimed Spidey content for them.
Might Lord and Miller’s ouster also have to do with complaints — reported last year —about their managerial style while overseeing “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”? Crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — described the process of making the $150M Sony project as “uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism” and “death by a thousand paper cuts.”
Staff claimed they were pushed to work more than 11 hours a day, 7 days a week, for more than a year to make up for time lost and were forced back to the drawing board as many as five times to revise work during the final rendering stage.
This kind of creative chaos has been a constant in Lord and Miller’s career. I feel like a version of this story comes out every time they’re involved with a new project. It also makes me think twice about the actual reason why they left the Star Wars film ‘Solo.’ They were fired from the project by Lucasfilm, after over four-and-a-half months of filming, about three-quarters through principal photography.
Lucasfilm stated that the firing was due to "creative differences,” while EW reported that Lord and Miller were going off-script and trying to make the film into more of a comedy. Two days later, Ron Howard was announced as their replacement.
Lord/Miller are currently shooting “Project Hail Mary,” starring Ryan Gosling, which is set to be their first directorial effort since exiting ‘Solo.’ This means that the last film they actually directed was actually 2014’s “22 Jump Street.” During that time, they also co-wrote “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” and “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part.”
Of course, we all know the rule: take these reactions with a grain of salt rather than treating them as gospel. Still, I will say that the film tested like gangbusters earlier this year, and Lionsgate clearly has confidence.