Why did The Golden Compass fail? The director says the studio took the movie away from him after he shot it
The Golden Compass had Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, a talking armored bear and a $180 million budget, and it still helped sink a studio.
New Line Cinema released The Golden Compass on December 7, 2007. It adapts Northern Lights, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy: Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards) travels north to rescue kidnapped children from the Magisterium, the church-like authority that rules her world, with Kidman as the glamorous and terrifying Mrs. Coulter and Craig as Lord Asriel. Chris Weitz wrote and directed it. New Line planned three films. It made one.
The numbers
The film opened to $25.8 million in the US and finished at about $70 million domestically. Worldwide it made $372 million, $302 million of it overseas, which on paper looks fine. The catch is that New Line had sold the overseas rights in advance to pay for the production, so most of that international money went to someone else.
What Weitz says happened
In November 2009, while promoting New Moon, Weitz told TheWrap how the film slipped away from him.
He called it "a terrible experience," and the reason wasn't the shoot.
"I was able to shoot what I wanted to," Weitz said.
The trouble started after the cameras stopped. "My editor was fired and another editor brought on," he said, and "gradually power was taken from me." Eventually, "the cut of the movie was taken away from me."
He was specific about what went: "any reference to religion or religious ideas was removed," along with "the darkness and threat at the end of the story." His verdict on the whole process: "all of this against my will."
The religion problem
The Magisterium is the problem New Line was trying to cut around. Weitz himself described the books' version as "a version of the Catholic Church gone wildly astray from its roots." In the film, it became a stand-in for "all dogmatic organizations."
That wasn't enough. On October 7, 2007, two months before release, the Catholic League called for a boycott, and after the weak US opening it declared victory. Pullman had a question for everyone involved: "Why don't we trust readers? Why don't we trust filmgoers?"
Years later, Weitz told Inverse how the studio saw it.
"That was kind of a third rail," Weitz said of the story's critique of religion.
The missing ending
Pullman's novel ends on a dark, brutal note in its last three chapters. The film doesn't include them. At release, Weitz said moving them to the sequel gave "the most promising conclusion to the first film." Later he cited "tremendous marketing pressure" to deliver "an upbeat ending."
The running time took a similar hit. The released film runs 113 minutes, and Weitz said a fuller cut "could probably end up at two-and-a-half hours." It has never been released.
The bear's voice
The "key character" whose voice "was redone" is Iorek Byrnison, the armored bear. Nonso Anozie recorded the role, and late in production New Line replaced him with Ian McKellen, against Weitz's wishes. New Line executive Toby Emmerich said he "never thought Anozie sounded like Iorek." Weitz's later take on the recast: "you're happy it's Ian McKellen."
What happened next
In February 2008, Time Warner folded New Line into Warner Bros., and the film's weak US performance is often cited as the last straw. In October 2008, New Line put the two sequels on hold, citing the recession. Sam Elliott, who played the aeronaut Lee Scoresby, had his own explanation: "The Catholic Church ... lambasted them, and I think it scared New Line off."
The film did get one big win. At the 80th Academy Awards, The Golden Compass took Best Visual Effects, beating Transformers.
Previously we wrote: How did they make The Lord of the Rings? Aragorn's most famous scream wasn't acting