Michelle Yeoh's new movie, BABYLON AD, is opening this weekend and it's getting tons of press: mostly negative and mostly having to do with the battles between the director and Fox, the film's distributor. French director Mathieu Kassovitz (LA HAINE, GOTHIKA) has disavowed the movie, most notably in an interview on AMC.com's sci-fi blog. He has also ditched publicity for the movie and, according to a story in Variety, headed off to a Caribbean island. Fox is distributing in the US and in several overseas territories (including Australia and Hong Kong where Michelle Yeoh counts for something, one would think, at the box office) and they can't possibly be thrilled about all this.

However, Kassovitz blames Fox for the problems with the movie, claiming that their insistence on cutting 15 - 20 minutes from the movie resulted in making it too confusing and taking out the political and emotional points he wanted to make. He also says that Fox interfered throughout the production, and that they just wanted a PG-13 movie. When contacted for this story about Kassovitz's comments by Variety, Fox replied as follows:

"Fox also noted that the film's star Vin Diesel is out fully supporting the film."

He may not be as supportive as Fox thinks. In the original AMC interview, Vin Diesel was asked about the movie's re-edit and shortening by Fox and said,  "Am I even in the movie any more, or am I on the cutting room floor?" Which doesn't sound great, and Michelle Yeoh hasn't commented yet on the battles between director and studio, and while it's possible that things could wind up going well and the picture could make DEATH RACE numbers over the weekend (the Variety story reports that it's tracking well with young males) overall this looks to be a bit of a disaster.

Fox has a long history of meddling with productions, leading even Brett Ratner to complain about the top-down control over every aspect of a production there when he did X-MEN 3 for them. And, they've had a lousy summer with THE HAPPENING, MEET DAVE and X-FILES all in a row. Given the fact that THE FANTASTIC FOUR and the X-MEN movies are franchises that may be grinding to a halt since Marvel is now its own studio and may want more control over films based on its properties than Fox is willing to allow, what's next for these guys? Maybe they can produce the next movie that Michelle Yeoh directs?

(Variety's coverage of the battle of BABYLON AD)

(AMC's original interview with Kassovitz)

(Story from LA Times on Fox's terrible, horrible, very bad summer)