Now I've heard something about Empires of the Deep already, a project that seems to have gone rather awry and the stories behind the production are rather surprising, offering the idea of a project fallen apart at the seams and destined for cult status for being so disastrous. Well that's what I've heard anyway.

The trailer looks epic, filled with a huge scale which is trying to emulate epic Hollywood films that have come before it, however from all accounts its fallen far short. Still, the trailer looks great.

There's an interesting article about the film Empires of the Deep from the New York Times which tells you everything you need to know about the Chinese production using the world's largest studio set outside of Bejing.

The article also tells us that the film was the concept of a property magnate Jon Jiang who has written the screenplay seeing it through forty drafts with the help of ten Hollywood scriptwriters. The film has the largest budget of any Chinese film so far although far short of a Hollywood epic, but that hasn't stopped the budget ballooning according to the article as well as other problems such as a drawn out schedule, late payments, production design issues, and more than that...

"...one French and two North American directors have left the project; the movie is now on its fourth director."

Wow. I thought forty drafts of a script was a bad sign but four directors? The story is truly worrying and you can't believe that a Hollywood studio would have kept this project going as long as it has, even if there was a rich backer behind the project.

You can read more about the trials and tribulations of the film over at the N.Y. Times but let's turn to the blurb of Empires of the Deep:

For thousand of years, legends of beautiful mermaids have enchanted people from all over the globe. Their fascinating and mysterious world has always captured the imagination of humans. In film history, there hasn't been a single movie that has uncovered and explored this mystical world. What secrets lurk beneath the depths? And why do beautiful mermaids seduce human men? "Mermaid Island" is the first underwater fantasy film to unveil and answer these questions.

There you go, sounds epic, and with Olga Kurylenko in the lead it sounds, well, not that inspiring. Mind you the trailer through TrailerAddict does try and live up to the larger scope even if it doesn't hit it or manage to present a cohesive or understandable story.

Oh dear. Not so epic is it?