This isn’t an in-depth exploration, and to be honest, there’s not much of a Libyan movie market. However, there’s one production company that won’t be delivering 20 promised films now. It’s the production company owned by embattled Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s son.
Al-Saadi Gadhafi is co-head of Natural Selection, the production company that delivered the Adrien Brody/Forrest Whitaker low-budget thriller The Experiement. They were moving forward on at least 20 films ‐ all floating around the $15 million range in a market starved for films not under $10 million or over $100 million. Now, with government sanctions and all of the family assets frozen, those projects are on hold indefinitely.
At least one of those projects might be a biopic about mafia assassin Richard “Ice Man” Kuklinski.
The production company was just getting off the ground, and it’s an understatement to say that Gadhafi has far more pressing concerns, but it’s effectively the death of a company that had plans to finance almost two dozen films. [THR]
