Taika Waititi, Netflix bow out of movie about Michael Jackson’s pet chimp

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Taika Waititi has been busier than ever over the last few years, cranking out movies like WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE and the massive THOR: RAGNAROK. He’s got a lot more stuff on his docket, and sadly that means he had to step away from another movie he was slated to work on, BUBBLES, the stop-motion biopic about Michael Jackson as told through the eyes of his pet chimp. As a result, Netflix, which was set to distribute the movie, has also bowed out of the project, leaving the movie with few branches left to cling to.

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Cartoon Brew got the scoop about both Waititi and Netflix were pulling out of the project, with a big reason for Waititi’s exit had to do with his busy schedule as JOJO RABBIT gears up for an awards season release. On top of that, he's prepping to direct the live-action AKIRA movie for Warner Bros. Based on a spec script by Isaac Adamson, Netflix paid $20 million for the movie out of Cannes back in 2017, a major reason for their interest being Waititi’s involvement. With him being gone, the streaming service doesn’t have much interest in the project.

Waititi spoke to Deadline earlier this month about the project, saying that the script had been around for some time but that it was “stuck in the early stages.”

“It’s a little bit stuck in the early stages of trying to figure out what it could be and what it would look like,” he said. “It’s a f*cking brilliant script, though. It’s so cool to look at the idea of telling a story like this through the eyes of a chimpanzee. But right now I’m finishing two other features — one which I’m looking to do this year — and finishing Jojo, and there are a couple of TV shows I’m developing. There’s about two or three that I mentioned to the press, and they’re way back on my back burner.”

He added:

“I’ve actually had to start pulling out of other things, because I was just becoming too busy. And so even doing something like that delays everything else. Even with an animated movie, it turns out, you have to be pretty present.”

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On top of directing movies, Waititi is also an executive producer on the FX series WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, which is based on his own movie. A separate hit for the movie was the exit of co-director Mark Gustafson, who left to co-direct Guillermo del Toro’s new Pinocchio movie.

While Waititi may be leaving for scheduling reasons, and Netflix backing out as a result of that, also not likely helping matters was the release of the HBO documentary LEAVING NEVERLAND. The two-part documentary chronicled the experiences of two men who claim Jackson engaged in sexual misconduct with them when they were younger. The disturbing and dark documentary shed new light on sexual assault allegations that plagued the latter end of Jackson’s career, and that could’ve killed some excitement over the BUBBLES project.

This is all a shame because the movie sounds like a wonderful, weird way of exploring a figure like Jackson, and Adamson’s Black List script won over Waititi for a reason. Perhaps Netflix isn’t so much done with the project for good so much as putting it on the back burner for a while.

JOJO RABBIT is in theaters October 18.