That Gerard Butler action flick Geostorm you've been eagerly waiting for is facing more problems, two years after production initially wrapped! Yeah, that's bad. It was supposed to have opened last month, only to be pushed to January 2017 before it was recently bumped nine months to October 20th 2017. But that has nothing to do with its latest batch of problems.
Apparently, some extensive and very expensive reshoots were done on the film after test audiences said, "We don't know what this Geostorm thing is but it sucks." I'm paraphrasing. Anyway, Warner Bros. and Skydance couldn't get Dean Devlin, the Roland Emmerich collaborator who was making his directorial debut, to come in for the reshoots so they hired Judge Dredd director Danny Cannon. He's working alongside producer Jerry Bruckheimer, so we shouldn't be surprised the budget ballooned by an additional $15M over the two weeks. Bruckheimer never met a dollar he couldn't spend on something blowing up.
So what the heck is a Geostorm, anyway? The film stars Butler as a satellite expert who must stop a man-made superstorm when weather satellites go haywire. Oh, and he also must stop an assassination on the President. That last part isn't an Olympus Has Fallen joke, it's actually part of the unnecessarily convoluted plot. How much all of this will remain is unclear because some big changes were made to the movie by Shutter Island writer Laeta Kalogridis. New characters have been introduced, including a female scientist, and at least one has been recast entirely. Add in the significant visual effects and music that are being redone and this sounds like a massive clusterbomb waiting to explode. And all of this for a movie 99% of people haven't heard of and wouldn't care about if they did.
If 'Rogue One' showed us anything it's that reshoots aren't necessarily a doom scenario. Every blockbuster goes through them. I just don't think the expectations were very high for Geostorm in the first place, and this seems like a lot of investment on such a marginal film.
