To say the odds are stacked against the Red Sonja reboot doing anything other than bombing at the box office might sound a little harsh considering it’s not even set to release until next year, but it would also be a fair summation based on the original’s history and the tribulations its do-over has been through.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has named the 1985 swords-and-sorcery failure as the movie he hates more than any other he’s ever made throughout his entire career, which naturally meant it was ripe for reinvention. Said reinvention has been ongoing since 2008, but it was only last year that the cameras started rolling.
On board behind the camera are director M. J. Bassett – who previously oversaw a dud set in a similar arena with the admittedly-underrated Solomon Kane, and Les Weldon, the producer of recent commercial catastrophe EXPEND4BLES. Oh, and there’s the involvement of production company Nu Boyana, with CEO Yariv Lerner coming right out and saying “we make a lot of sh*tty movies.”
Encouraging stuff, then, but Weldon has tried to drum up enthusiasm by offering to Collider that Red Sonja will be opting for a more tangible approach, although we’ll believe it when we see it looking at how EXPEND4BLES was cursed with some truly awful CGI.
“That film is very rooted and very real if you will, but there are a couple of sequences that we have to get the CGI right so that you don’t look at it and go, “Oh, that creature wasn’t quite there.” So we finished the film, and we’re ready to get into the next part of post on it. Well, Red Sonja is also a little bit of a, I don’t wanna say a darker take, but a little bit darker take than you would expect, certainly compared to the original Red Sonja. We want to be very careful with the CG to make sure it’s done properly and does the film a service rather than a disservice.”
Matilda Lutz plays the title role, and with no release date locked in as of yet, there’s plenty of time for Red Sonja V2.0 to convince people it won’t be terrible, which is a lot easier said than done.