Another Disney Film Canned: Robin Williams Comedy Wedding Band Is Scuttled

There are changes afoot at Disney. Rich Ross became the new chief not long ago, and about a month later he canned development on Captain Nemo: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Now he's killed off Wedding Band, the romantic comedy with Robin Williams, Anna Faris and Diane Keaton. We've primarily reported on the film in Casting Notes pieces and it wasn't a movie I was much looking forward to. (That title causes physical pain.)

Films get dropped and/or put into turnaround all the time, but it's an interesting state of affairs to see one of the biggest studios publicly pulling the plug on more than one project in a short time span.

THR reports that Wedding Banned has been put into turnaround, so we may see it find a home somewhere else, perhaps with a different cast. Part of the decision was reportedly made based on the relatively poor performance of Old Dogs, the recent Robin Williams and John Travolta film which failed to replicate the runaway success of Wild Hogs. (Can't manufacture that sort of unexpected success, but that fact never stops anyone from trying. Rhyming names aren't enough.)

Question, then, is what films will Disney make? Ross has greenlit a new Black Hole, to be made by Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski, and has Fallen in development as well. And I'm amused to see that Ross is the latest exec to be crying about how Twilight could and should have landed at his studio; he also says The Blind Side should have been a Disney film. Easy to see this stuff in hindsight, right? Though the lack of initiative on Twilight will forever seem like a massive mistake. So Disney will try to create its own version with Fallen — what was that about being able to reverse-engineer the success of another film again?