David Fincher’s HBO series Utopia in jeopardy due to budget issues

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

David Fincher can't seem to catch a break at HBO; first, production on his 1980s music video comedy Video Synchronicity was halted and now Utopia, an adaptation of the U.K. series of the same name, is in trouble as well. Utopia, which has already cast a number of actors, possibily including Rooney Mara, is dangerously over budget and HBO is struggling to figure out just how to proceed. At the Television Critics Association's summer press tour, HBO programming president Michael Lombardo mentioned that both of their collaborations with David Fincher were experiencing problems.

We're at that moment, trying to figure out if there is a path forward or not for Utopia.

Despite Lombardo's claim that they're trying to work things out, Deadline has heard that the actors cast in Utopia have been released, which seems to indicate that Utopia is well and truly dead. Both series had received straight-to-series orders from HBO but the first indication of trouble came when work on Video Synchronicity was halted right in the middle of production, however Michael Lombardo seems optimistic that once the issues with Utopia are dealt with in one way or another, that David Fincher will be able to return to Video Synchronicity:

When we both saw the third and fourth [episodes], we realized we needed to go back and do some work on the scripts, David's attention at that point — he is someone who likes to be hands on, on everything — got diverted by another project [HBO's Utopia]. [He's] not good at letting us go ahead and do what we needed to do on Video Synchronicity while he was working on Utopia. I texted with him today, we're going to turn our attention soon back to Video Synchronicity and figure out the path forward. But I fully expect we're going to be able to finish that up. There's too much good stuff for us not to figure it out. We're going to figure it out.

As David Fincher always manages to produce quality work I'd hate for both these projects to fall apart, which is something Lombardo would hate to see as well, as he said "I seriously hope not. [But] I've been doing this long enough to never say never." Fingers crossed.