You'd think that Hollywood would have learned its lesson by now, but no: another major release starring Edward Norton, another script controversy.
As Anne Thompson reports in Variety, during the pre-production stages of the new Incredible Hulk movie, the fledgling Marvel Studios made the mistake of letting time slip away from them until they were put in the position of offering Norton a screenwriting credit (as well as an unbilled producer's role) in order to get him on board. Unfortunately for everyone within a gamma bomb blast radius of the film, the movie already had a screenwriter (Zak Penn) and a producer/director (Louis Leterrier) with ideas of their own, and by the time the movie finally opened, we were treated to the hauntingly familiar sight of Norton appearing on talk shows to complain about how his vision for the movie was bastardized by studio hacks.
Thompson follows the whole complex affair, with its typical behind-the-scenes wheedling, Norton's pretensions of classing up the superhero movie, Penn's determination to see a script he wrote almost 20 years ago finally see the light of day, and the post-production battles over who owned the right to the final cut of the film. No one emerges smelling like a daisy, with Marvel Studios coming across as naive at best and duplicitous at worst, and Norton once again looking like both a man who's passionate about his work and a total prick.
Why does it all seem like something we've seen before? Perhaps you remember a little movie called American History X...
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