Filming for Simon West's STRATTON starring Henry Cavill was set to begin next week, and Cavill created a production company (Promethean Productions) with his brother to bring the character from Duncan Falconer's book series of the same name to the big screen, however Screen Daily has learned the actor has left the planned movie. GFM Films was selling STRATTON at Cannes last week, and co-founder Guy Collins told the site that they are contacting distributors to let them know Cavill will no longer be playing SBS special forces trooper John Stratton.
After securing many distribution deals ahead of the market, we had a really good Cannes and had closed more deals ahead of production next week. But just before leaving Cannes last Friday we were informed by the production company that they wanted to push the start date back by around three weeks to finalise some additional casting and make some further fixes to the script.
Then, during several meetings this week in London with both sets of producers including Henry Cavill, he told us he has decided not to shoot this script at this time. He had a different vision of what the film should be to us and the production team and wanted to delay production until September and shoot a different story and script…We want to keep the production team together and Simon West as director so we have no option other than to exercise our rights under our funding agreements and replace Henry – which is not an easy task.
Well, that sucks for Henry Cavill, but I'm curious to know why he waited so long to express his displeasure with the script, since the actor seemed really excited about the project. It does sound like the film is going to move forward with Simon West behind the camera though, so who do want to play John Stratton?
Henry Cavill can be seen next in Guy Ritchie's THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., which opens on August 14, 2015.