More Details On Jonah Hex Reshoots; Francis Lawrence Indeed Hired As 'Consultant'

We've known for a while that Jonah Hex would be going back in front of cameras for reshoots this month. In this case, 'additional shooting' may be a more appropriate term, as the point seems to be adding new material in addition to 'fixing' a few scenes shot last year. Once the reshoot news arrived, rumors began to swirl around the Warner Bros. film and now we've got some additional info on what exactly is going down in Hex's wild west.

THR provides a bit more info than we've previously known. First, the trade's Heat Vision blog confirms the rumor that I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence will be around as a consultant. One might easily read that as a damning indictment of the direction by Jimmy Hayward, who is making the jump to live-action features with this movie.

Or perhaps not, as the point of the reshoots seems to be primarily to increase the scope of the film in accordance with the fact that it was pulled forward from an August 6 release to June 18. What was a late-summer treat for a not quite mainstream audience is now placed square in the middle of tentpole season. Lawrence has become a go-to guy at WB, so is he on deck to mentor Hayward and make sure the new footage is appropriately up to scale? The footage shown at Comic Con last year was already more expansive than I'd expected, based on the script, so I'm curious to see what the new material adds.

The trade says that ten days of additional shooting have been scheduled to knock out twelve new script pages, along with a few re-shoots of existing material. It also reports that there are rumors that the film does have problems, and I have to wonder if those are essentially growing pains on film. Jonah Hex was originally scripted and to be directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, then became a bigger deal when Josh Brolin came on as Hex, and has become even bigger with the new date. So the growth process hasn't been smooth? It happens. So long as the final cut works, nothing else will matter.