No BARBARELLA movie, says Rodriguez

Robert Rodriguez's on-again/off-again Barbarella remake is... officially off. (Click the image at left to buy the original on DVD.) The Planet Terror director was all set to make the film with his girlfriend Rose McGowan in the lead, but he now tells MTV that he ultimately opted out of the project for family reasons.

It came to the point where [a company from] Germany offered us a $70 million budget, which would have been by far the biggest budget I ever would have had for a movie... But I had to shoot it in Germany and post it in Germany. Nothing against Germany, but I have five kids and I was like, ‘God, I don't know if we can do that. I don't know if I can be away that long.'

But it sounds like the filmmaker is having a hard time letting this one go. He was so taken with the remake's concept art, he's considering publishing a book of it.

We had all this artwork and screen tests of what it would look like. It was a really cool, R-rated, sexy-almost like that [1981 animated] movie, ‘Heavy Metal'-version of a ‘Star Wars' movie. Something that no one ever could get to see. It was gonna be really great... People said, ‘Why are you doing ‘Barbarella?' And I showed them the artwork and explained it. They would go, ‘Ooooh, okay!'

(Having re-watched Heavy Metal recently, I have a hard time believing you could get away with a movie that raunchy in a mainstream cineplex today. That South Park parody was dead on... Heavy Metal is made of boobs.)

The Bloody Disgusting blog briefly mentions that Rodriguez is also off of the Predator sequel, but that's the first (and last) I've heard of that.

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