Just a cou­ple of weeks after we heard the encour­ag­ing Gore Verbin­ski news we receive a bomb-shell from Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios. It appears that the bud­get for the under­wa­ter fea­ture has been spi­ral­ing out of con­trol, reach­ing val­ues around $160m, and in a move to cut costs (to say $100m) a num­ber of pro­duc­tion staff have been let go. Other mea­sures include scout­ing for cheaper film­ing loca­tions, e.g. London.

Verbin­ski states,

“We were asked by Uni­ver­sal to move the film out­side the U.S. to take advan­tage of a tax credit. […] We are eval­u­at­ing whether this is some­thing we want to do. In the mean­time, the film is in a hold­ing pattern.”

Both the game and movie stu­dios vow that this will not descend into another Halo movie fiasco which has seen pro­duc­tion indef­i­nitely halted.