It took $10 million to erase Kevin Spacey from “All the Money in the World” and replace him with Christopher Plummer.
Luckily, the producers had deep pockets and a major studio– Sony– to support them.
Such is not the case with the one big movie Spacey still has in the can. “The Billionaire Boys Club” is an independent feature with over 25 producers and a $15 million budget.
The “BBC,” as it was known, was a Ponzi scheme run by a young charismatic guy named Joe Hunt (Ansel Elgort). Spacey plays Ron Levin, a freelance journalist and con man who fell in with the BBC and was consequently murdered. The movie also stars Emma Roberts, Jeremy Irvine, Billie Lourd, Suki Waterhouse, and Judd Nelson. Worldwide distribution was pre-sold but there’s no US distributor. And that’s a problem now that Spacey is like Kryptonite.
“Everyone in the film has been damaged by this,” says one source. “They’ve all been harmed. And we don’t have a producer who has the money to go back and reshoot Spacey’s scenes– even if it could be done.”
For now, producers will screen the film in the new year and hope that one of the distributors who saw it before Spacey’s scandal broke will still go ahead with it. The fact that Spacey’s accusers have trickled down in the last few weeks could help. And it’s not like “BBC” is a Disney musical. It’s a movie about murder, drugs, sex, etc. In that sense, Spacey’s notoriety might add some glamor to the publicity.
