It appears that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader may have just been pushed a year back. The word comes from Box Office Mojo, and is followed up by ComingSoon.net with this.
On the heels of yesterday’s awesome Prince Caspian poster, Walt Disney Pictures has pushed back The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader from May 1, 2009 to May 7, 2010.
They’ve filled Dawn Treader‘s previous May 1, 2009 slot with the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced live-action/CGI family feature G-Force. If you’re wondering just what G-Force is: it follows a group of intelligent animal commandos working for a government agency trying to prevent an evil billionaire from taking over the world.
We’ve confirmed it with Disney, and it is absolutely true that it will be released on May 7, 2010.
Official Statement: In consideration of the challenging schedules for our young actors, Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media have chosen to delay the start of production for “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” until summer 2008. The new release date for this highly anticipated third entry in the “Narnia” series will now be May 7, 2010.
Does this mean that the final product will be better? I don’t know if it will benefit from this push in the way that we hope. There are a couple reasons why it may not.
Cost
For one thing, it would drive up the production cost. More time means more money. A lengthier shoot means spending more on the film. I heard somewhere that a low cost day would be around $25,00-$50,000. And that is being conservative with the numbers.
CG may look the same
Regardless of how much more time they have, they’re going to make it as realistic as they can. Sure, technology will get better, become more advanced, but we’re seeing CG hit superb levels of realism that we’ve never imagined possible.
I’m sure that Walden and Disney are going to do everything they can to make this as spectacular a film as we’ve ever seen, and they’ll spare no expense in doing so, but I think we need to take a step back and realize that, regardless of time, they wouldn’t have given us any less than the great film that we’re going to see. I hope that it is a better film, but we’d only know for sure if we got a 2009 release, followed by a 2010 release of the same film. Then we could compare both products.