His
Emancipation
is not for now. Filming of Will Smith's upcoming film dedicated to the escape of a former African-American slave has been put on hold due to the identification of several cases of Covid within the production team, Deadline reported on Sunday.
"A small number of people tested positive"
for Covid-19 would have been counted among the staff, evokes the American media. A mere drop among the hundreds of people mobilized on the film's construction site, this contaminated grain of sand fatally caused the cogs of this ambitious historic production to be brought to a standstill by Antoine Fuqua (
Equalizer
,
Les Sept Mercenaires
) for Apple.
Read also: Will Smith and Antoine Fuqua boycott the state of Georgia over controversial electoral law
Interrupted for the duration of the week, the production of
Emancipation
had just started in the middle of July, after a month of delay caused by the late change of the filming site. Originally supposed to be filmed in the state of Georgia, the production - which includes Will Smith - decided in April to relocate to Louisiana in reaction to the passage of a new electoral law restricting access to the vote in this former segregationist state in the southern United States.
"Georgia's new electoral laws recall the voting restrictions adopted at the end of Reconstruction
(period 1865 to 1877 following the Civil War, Editor's note)
to prevent many Americans from voting"
, were indignant Will Smith and Antoine Fuqua in a joint statement released in the spring.
More and more shoots disturbed by the variant
While we are still a long way from the radical halts of several weeks, or even months, such as the global film industry may have experienced in 2020, this brief stop illustrates the growing effect that the Delta variant of Covid-19 produced in the countries where it is distributed. In the United States as in Europe, the upsurge in the number of new positive cases for the virus has multiplied the micro-stoppages of filming in recent weeks.
House of the Dragon
, the new series being prepared in the
Game of Thrones
universe
, thus experienced two days of interruption in July, after the discovery of a positive case for the virus. And in early June, the decidedly endless filming of the next
Mission: Impossible
had, too, had to take a hiatus due to a positive PCR test, six months after Tom Cruise was angry over non-compliance with sanitary rules by part of the film's production. The evolution of the Delta variant is closely watched by the major studios, which fear more than anything new restrictions.
"We can expect to see some changes in release dates if this were to intensify during the fall and if revenue were to start to suffer,"
commented US analyst Jeff Bock in an article published on Wednesday. by
Variety
.
Announced last year in the midst of the Black Lives Matter wave,
Emancipation
will star The
Prince of Bel-Air
,
Independence Day
and
Men in Black
as Peter, an American immortalized in 1863 in one of most popular photographs of former slaves from the time of the Civil War. Dubbed
The Scourged Back
, his portrait - captured in a northern military camp where Peter had just completed a long and terrible escape - exposes his back bristling with deep scars. He had obtained them in the plantation which held him captive and from which he had managed to escape during the American Civil War before joining the ranks of the Union himself.
"It was the first viral image on the brutality of slavery of global significance,"
director Antoine Fuqua commented for Deadline last summer. Presented as an action thriller closer to an
Apocalypto
than a
12 Years a Slave
,
Emancipation
does not yet have a release date.