Some rather strange reports are circulating around the remake of Road House, ranging from the firing of its producer to using AI to finish it.
Hollywood is, of course a buzzing hive of gossip at the best of times, but a particularly strange couple of morsels emerged from Tinseltown on the 30th November. According to a Variety report, veteran producer Joel Silver has been fired from Amazon, the mega corporation which owns film studio MGM.
Before he was (allegedly) ousted, Silver was working on Road House, a remake of the 1989 action thriller which he’d also produced, as well as Play Dirty, a crime thriller starring Mark Wahlberg. Anonymous sources told Variety that Silver was fired for being “verbally abusive” to a pair of female executives.
Named sources close to Silver, meanwhile – private investigator Anthony Pellicano and attorney Bryan Freedman – refute this story. Pellicano says, “The parting of the ways is amicable. He was not fired. There were just disagreements with creative concerns.”
Freedman puts it in stronger terms, stating, “As Amazon readily admits, Joel Silver completed all of this services on Road House and was not relieved of his duties, terminated or fired from his services on Road House. He finished the film and did an excellent job. With respect to Play Dirty, as agreed to by Amazon, Joel was in no way terminated with or for cause on that picture. None of this is in dispute. To say he was fired is irresponsible and defamatory.”
Then there are yet more anonymous sources, which claim that Silver wasn’t fired over verbal abuse, but rather for “raising concerns about Amazon wanting to use AI to finish Road House production during the strike.”
Podcast | Road House (1989) and Rush (2013)
The actors strike began in July this year and only drew to a close on the 9th November when the Screen Actor’s Guild finally reached a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Hollywood writers were also on strike, from May to September. Inevitably, the strikes caused considerable disruption to a number of film and TV productions, with several projects either pushed back to later dates or even cancelled entirely.
This is, however, the first time we’ve heard talk of artificial intelligence – presumably a piece of software like Midjourney or similar – being used to help keep a production on track. It’s particularly ironic, given that the use of AI in film and TV was one of the major things writers and actors have spent much of the year striking against.
Not that any evidence of the claim has emerged so far; a representative from Amazon told IndieWire that there wasn’t an “ounce” of truth to the report, and added that production wrapped in December 2022, some six months before the strikes began.
Back at Variety, the story goes that Silver had a falling out over the approach to Road House’s release. The film, directed by Edge Of Tomorrow and The Bourne Identity's Doug Liman and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, is said to be going straight to Amazon Prime in 2024; Silver reportedly wanted it to get a theatrical release.
Play Dirty, meanwhile, was originally going to star Robert Downey Jr, but he reportedly dropped out and Wahlberg was given the starring role instead.
It’s all a celtic knot of claims and refutations, and it’s currently unclear what the truth is. The good news, though, is that the Road House remake is said to be really good, and “one of the highest-testing films for Liman”. The person who makes that claim is, of course, anonymous.
