Prometheus Trailer Leak Upsets Fox Chairman Tom Rothman
Posted 12.01.11 by Ryan
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, a bootleg version of the trailer for director Ridley Scott's Prometheus was leaked online just as Twentieth Century Fox had released some new images and details about the upcoming sci-fi movie.
While bootlegs usually want for quality, the Prometheus trailer was beyond poor, shot, presumably by the uploader, right off a TV screen with the perpetrator's image often reflecting off the screen. Fox eventually worked to remove the bootlegged trailer, but the damage was already done according to Fox chairman and CEO Tom Rothman. He called the leak "heartbreakingly unfair" when he talked to MTV at the Gotham Independent Film Awards.
It's not fair. It's heartbreakingly unfair, because Ridley Scott, in addition to everything else ... the quality of the visuals is as spectacularly beautiful, shot in 3-D compositionally the way only a master could do it. For some early, early, early, early half-baked, half-assed test to leak, it's so unfair. I will promise you this: When that material is ready and it comes out, you should go see it in 3-D on a screen. It will deliver.
Rothman also insisted that Prometheus is not a prequel to Scott's 1979 sci-fi classic Alien, as is rumored. Initially set as a prequel to Alien, it was the arrival of screenwriter Damon Lindelof (Lost, Cowboys and Aliens) and his subsequent reworking of Jon Spaihts's script that made Scott re-title the movie Prometheus, revealing that the movie would feature "a new, grand mythology and universe in which this original story takes place," that would only have "strands of Alien's DNA". Scott recently downgraded those "strands" to a "vague notion" of some "slight Alien DNA" while Lindelof revealed in June that Prometheus would "take place in that Alien universe" but would precede the original movie and wouldn't be "burdened by all the tropes of that franchise with Facehuggers and Chestbursters, and all that stuff."
Kinda sounds like a prequel to us, but Rothman insists it isn't. "Hand to heart," Rothman said.
I will tell you, here's the way to think about it. If you looked at the whole movie, 95 percent of it is entirely unto itself. Ridley said it right: If you're a fan and you look closely, you'll spot strands of the DNA — I mean that metaphorically. [But] I'll tell you the great thing: It's way bigger than that. The ideas are way bigger, way more original and — it's a scary word — way more profound.
Next Showing: Prometheus opens June 8, 2012