David Fincher's war with Paramount

Benjamin Button killed Heavy Metal

Sep 3rd 2008 By Sam Ashurst

David Fincher has been struggling with Paramount over the running time of his long-gestating project The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button for a while, but the story just got a little more interesting.

It seems a connection's been made between Fincher's argument over the length of his final cut and the studio's decision to drop his adult animation Heavy Metal from their schedules.

According to Kevin Eastman, the editor of Heavy Metal magazine: "We developed it for Paramount in January... And it was time for them to make a decision [about going forward with the project] and they were at odds with Fincher over another project, 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,' [because] they wanted him to reduce the running time...

"And so they said, 'Until you step up to do what we want you to do with Benjamin, we're not going to greenlight any other of [your] movies.' And David said, 'Fine, fuck you, I'm going to set up [Heavy Metal] somewhere else,' so we jumped over to Sony and set it up there."

We're going to keep our eye on this one. Stay tuned to Total Film for more developments.

[Source: The Playlist]