The Boogeyman premiered in theaters on June 2, 2023, and has already gained a moderately successful opening weekend at the box office. Despite getting a mixed aggregate review, most critics reacted positively to the movie with a few complaints.
Did you know the film’s posters with the child actor carrying a moon lamp in the dark could have been a bit different if it weren’t for Disney? According to Rob Savage, Vivien Lyra Blair, who plays the young sawyer in the horror film based on Stephen King’s short story of the same name, was meant to carry another illuminating object.
The director told Collider that originally Sawyer had a knockoff lightsaber that would fritz in and out in the Boogeyman’s presence, and she’d use it to seek him in the shadows. However, Disney intervened since it didn’t want the Star Wars connection in the horror genre, that too with a faulty item. Read his complete statement below:
Originally, the script was written with Sawyer’s character having a knock-off lightsaber that she would hug in bed, which would then fritz out during the scene that then became the moon ball scene. Our office was filled with different Lightsaber toys because we had to find the perfect lightsaber. So we were constantly having frustrated Lightsaber battles during prep.
Disney’s hesitation in letting Savage use one of their biggest IPs for more relatability or views is understandable. Additionally, Blair also played a young Princess Leia in Obi-Wan: Kenobi and her using a crappy lightsaber copy was also a disgrace to the item and the Star Wars character.
I’d completely forgotten that we cast young Princess Leia, and Disney didn’t really like the idea of young Princess Leia having a broken lightsaber that was fritz out. It looked like a piece of shit. So they said, no, we can’t do that, and we had to come up with something else very quickly.
Disney might have done The Boogeyman a favor, though, after they forbade them to use the Star Wars weapon as a torch. If Sawyer were to have used a lightsaber, Star Wars fans might have taken offense, and the rising success of the film would have been overshadowed by unnecessary hate.
Do you think using the lightsaber instead of the moon lamp might have been the way to go for The Boogeyman? Let us know in the comments!
About The Boogeyman
The Boogeyman is a 2023 American supernatural horror film directed by Rob Savage from a screenplay by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods, and Mark Heyman, based on the 1973 short story of the same name by Stephen King. The film stars Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, Vivien Lyra Blair, and David Dastmalchian.
It’s about a psychiatrist, where a man named Lester Billings talks to the doctor about the “murders” of his three young children, describing the events of the past several years. His first two children died mysteriously of apparently unrelated causes when left alone in their bedrooms. The only commonalities were that the children cried “Boogeyman!” before being left alone, and the closet door was ajar after discovering their corpses, even though Billings is certain the door was shut.
The Boogeyman was released in the United States on June 2, 2023, by 20th Century Studios.
Source: Collider
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