Alex Proyas’ Hugely Ambitious ‘Paradise Lost’ Gets Its Wings Clipped, Project Reportedly Cancelled

By  · Published on February 9th, 2012

Never let it be said that director Alex Proyas didn’t have a tremendous vision for his big screen adaptation of John Milton’s epic poem of the same name, but that same ambition appears to be what has sunk Paradise Lost for good. Reports are now coming in from various outlets that the project, with a huge budget that already exceeded $120m and a vision that included technology that, as Variety’s Jeff Sneider puts it, “wasn’t there,” has been killed by Legendary Pictures.

Proyas was hired for the gig back in September of 2010 and, since then, had gathered an impressive and up-and-coming cast for the epic tale of angelic battles, including Bradley Cooper, Benjamin Walker, Casey Affleck, Djimon Hounsou, Diego González Boneta, and Camilla Belle. The film’s shooting schedule was already moved from January to early this summer, but that’s all moot now that the film has been scrapped entirely.

Legendary was reportedly trying to get the film’s huge budget down to the $120m range, after already spending somewhere in the “low eight figures” on the production already. But budget woes, coupled with Proyas’ technologically ambitious plan to use post-production CG to augment much of the film, including at least three giant-scale battle scenes across Heaven, Earth, and Hell, have ultimately killed the production for now. Deadline Hell reports that “this was all about visual effects, unfortunately.” [Deadline Hell and Variety, via /Film]