With Nickelodeon and Paramount’s ‘Monster Trucks’ finally released, we’ve learned a few new things about the film from director Chris Wedge (‘Ice Age’,’Robots’.) Most importantly, though, is what they ended up needing to change so that it could be child-friendly and not actually scare the kiddos who would clearly be in the audience for the film.
Specifically, they had to make quite a few cuts to the very beginning of the film according to director Chris Wedge:
“In my experience the beginning of a movie is important. It gives you a little bit of tone for what you’re in for, it gives you all of the spices or ingredients. When I showed the first cut, I think some kids were too scared. We had a little slogan in the cutting room: ‘Too Scawy.’ There were oil men flying through the air and tentacles whipping around, and people weren’t sure that they were in the right theater.”
Monster films that should entertain kids and adults are a hard mix these days as they either get too dark or too kid friendly so it sounds like they had to tone down the horror at the start as to not scare both the kids and parents who think they were in a movie not targeting their children after all.
That being said, it didn’t seem to be a problem that plagued most of the film once they hit the editing room:
“But that was just a little bit of editorial because the main point of the movie was to make this truck into a character and to have fun watching it move around kind of like kids imagine their toys moving around when they’re playing with their little trucks and cars on the kitchen table or on the arms of the sofa.”
It does sound like they had a solid plan for the film and pacing that was mostly settled in advance but still just needed some fine tuning in the intro.
Are you looking forward to ‘Monster Trucks’? Share your thoughts below.
Synopsis:
Looking for any way to get away from the life and town he was born into, Tripp (Lucas Till), a high school senior, builds a Monster Truck from bits and pieces of scrapped cars. After an accident at a nearby oil-drilling site displaces a strange and subterranean creature with a taste and a talent for speed, Tripp may have just found the key to getting out of town and a most unlikely friend.
‘Monster Trucks’ will be roaring onto the big screen on January 13th, 2017.
Source: Cinema Blend
Stuart Conover is an author, blogger, and all around geek. When not busy being a father and husband he tries to spend as much time as possible immersed in comic books, science fiction, and horror! Would you like to know more? Follow him on Twitter!
