The 'plagues' of Wendell & Wild : fires, ice storms, rioters, and COVID-19
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Was the set of Wendell & Wild cursed? It's hard to say. Did the stop-motion animated film, about two demon brothers and the young girl who summons them to the human realm, face abnormal odds to reach the finish line? Yes. As you listen to director Henry Selick, the man behind such classics as The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, chronicle all of those obstacles — "plagues," he calls them — "cursed" starts to sound like a reasonable explanation.
Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, the comedic masterminds behind Key & Peele, voice the title characters of Wendell and Wild, respectively. Lyric Ross (This Is Us) lends her voice to Kat, a rebellious young girl who's forced to live at a Catholic school after losing her parents in an accident. She also happens to be a Hell Maiden, someone with the capabilities to bring these two demons to the Land of the Living. But Kat wants something in return that sends them all down a demented, uproarious adventure.
The first plague of production was literal. The COVID-19 pandemic "shut us down for almost a year," Selick, 69, tells EW. Then came a more Biblical plague. Production was set up at a studio in Portland, Ore., in 2021 during what was known as the heat dome, marking the deadliest heat wave the region had ever seen. Temperatures rose above 100 degrees and more than 60 people died in the area. "We were the hottest place on earth for about a week," Selick says.
Then came the fires. Oregon does have a history of wildfires, but not so much in the production's area. Climate change has since caused them to spread. "The smoke was thick," Selick remembers. "The fires were getting close [to the studio]. We said, 'If we rescue the puppets, we could probably still make the movie.' But if the puppets burned, it'd be like all your actors burned." The crew then had to "evacuate the puppets" before the flames reached their workspace, the director says. "Luckily the fires were stopped. Then we were able to bring back the puppets and put 'em back to work."
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Selick also mentions ice storms that threatened to knock out their servers during colder months. "But we had backup generators," he says. Then came the protests. Like in many other parts of the country during 2021, demonstrators took to the streets of Oregon to rally against all forms of discrimination, including racism perpetrated by the police. The demonstrations attracted rioters, which affected the safety of the crew as they commuted to work, as well as the threat of destruction of property.
Cursed? The argument could certainly be made. But what was a few more months of delays to Selick, who had already spent the past 13 years trying to find his next film project?
In the aftermath of Coraline, a stop-motion film he made for studio Laika in 2009, based on the Neil Gaiman book, Selick had a deal with Pixar and Disney to make another stop-motion movie. Among the ideas he pitched was The Shadow King, about a nine-year-old orphan living in New York who's taught by a shadow girl to use his abnormally spindly hands to create shadow puppets.
Selick's deal was contingent on producing The Shadow King with a budget of roughly one-third of a standard Pixar film. "It was plenty of money," the director notes. But John Lasseter, then the head of Pixar, "just couldn't help himself," Selick adds. Lasseter began to change script and production elements that ended up raising costs.
"If he just left us alone, they would've had a really good movie for the budget, blah, blah, blah," Selick says. "That's just not the way he worked back then." Disney, too, didn't know how to sell the macabre family concept, coupled with the fact that other stop-motion films that year, including Tim Burton's Frankenweenie, didn't make a lot of money. So The Shadow King was shut down. Selick still has five minutes of finished footage to remember the project.
Years later, as Selick took care of his ailing mother in New Jersey, he began to think of some other ideas. That's when Key & Peele was on Comedy Central. "I started watching that and fell in love with those guys," Selick recalls. "After three years, I finally approached them."
Perhaps The Shadow King itself was another one of Selick's "plagues" because here he is, 13 years after Coraline, and Wendell & Wild is only now ready to premiere on Netflix Oct. 28, with a script co-written by Peele. Selick confirms, slyly, "It wasn't a plan to step away this long."
Wendell & Wild hits theaters Oct. 21, then launches on Netflix Oct. 28.
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