Joe Wright’s ‘Indian Summer’ With Cate Blanchett Put On Backburner

It’s not going to be such an “Indian Summer” for Joe Wright or Working Title Films, as their adaptation of Alex von Tunzelmann’s book “Indian Summer: The Mountbattens, Nehru and the Dying Days of the Raj,” about the end of British rule in India in 1947, has been indefinitely delayed.

Cate Blanchett was set to play Lady Mountbatten, the wife of the last viceroy of India, who oversaw the transition to independence in the country. Von Tunzelmann’s book alleges that she had an affair with the first independent prime minister of the country, Jawaharlal Nehru, and this seems to be one of the principle reasons for the delay — director Wright tells Variety “The Indian government wanted us to make less of the love story while the studio wanted us to make more of the love story.”

Budgetary issues were also thought to be a concern — Working Title can independently greenlight anything under $30 million, but need parent company’s Universal approval for anything above that, and the cost of “Indian Summer” was thought to be pushing $40 million, so the studio pulled the plug. Wright toyed with the idea of making the movie on a smaller scale, but has decided to stay attached to the project, along with Blanchett, in the hope of getting it going again in the future.

As Variety notes, it’s going to be harder and harder for people to get Oscar-baity adult dramas like this made in the next few years, particularly with the financial failure of the likes of Working Title’s “State of Play” — we were at a panel with a senior executive from the company a few months back, who said that the company are more or less exclusively looking at comedies during the recession (of course, they seem to be ignoring that “The Boat That Rocked,” their most recent collaboration with Richard Curtis, shortly to be released in re-edited form in the States as “Pirate Radio,” also seriously underwhelmed at the box office).

Meanwhile, it means slots have now opened up in Blanchett and Wright’s schedules. We like Wright a lot: “Pride & Prejudice” is a pretty great film, and the first third of “Atonement” is terrific, so hopefully he’ll manage to find something worthy of his abilities — Variety says he’d been previously linked to a movie about the first Afro-Caribbean immigrants to London in the 1940s. We also hear that the producers of a major, major franchise want Wright to helm their next installment, but we’d be very surprised if Wright did that one, particularly considering the last entry in the series…