A topic of conversation that has dominated moviegoers’ discussions over the last year has centred around Henry Cavill, his roles in Justice League and Mission: Impossible – Fallout, and the infamous moustache.
As you know by now, Henry Cavill had a moustache for many of his Superman scenes in Justice League due to the extensive reshoots that he was part of. He had grown the moustache for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which he was shooting at the same time. The moustache was covered up with CGI in Justice League, but many fans were still able to notice and felt that the final result was distracting.
Studio sources indicated that Warner Bros. wanted Cavill to shave his moustache for Justice League reshoots, but that Paramount wouldn’t allow it because they were filming the new Mission: Impossible movie. But it seems that that might not be the case, and now we have a classic situation of “he said, she said” on our hands.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie was a guest on Empire’s podcast to talk about the movie, and he went into great detail about the whole Justice League situation.
When the question came – the reshoots for Justice League came out – [Charles] Roven called me, and he said, ‘We need your help and we need to shave Henry [Cavill]’s mustache. We need him to come back and we need to do these reshoots.’ And I said, ‘Look, Chuck, naturally I want to do everything I can to help you, but I also have to think about our production. Let me talk to everybody and figure out what the scheduling would be.’ And I went and spoke to Jake Myers, and the suggestion was made through channels that we shave the mustache and Henry could begin to grow the mustache back and that then there would be – they would give us the resources to digitally fill in Henry’s mustache. Because like it or not, a fake mustache in close-up on a 75mm lens is never going to look like anything but a fake mustache.
So, we offered the following compromise: Jake Myers calculated the amount of money that it would take to replace the number of shots, and essentially what Jake was able to project was about a $3 million visual effects budget. So, I don’t know how much Henry was in Justice League, I’ve never seen the movie, but I can tell you how much it would’ve cost for Mission: Impossible to digitally add Henry Cavill’s mustache, and we said yes. We said, here’s what we’ll do: give us the $3 million and we’ll shut down, and that will give Henry Cavill the time to grow his mustache back, and we’ll just shut our movie down. …We said we’ll do this, at which point, somebody from Paramount Pictures said, ‘What is going on? What are you people even talking about?’ They’re like, ‘There’s no way we’re going to do that.’ We were just like, ‘Okay.’ That was the best plan that we could come up with.
When the question came – the reshoots for Justice League came out – [Charles] Roven called me, and he said, ‘We need your help and we need to shave Henry [Cavill]’s mustache. We need him to come back and we need to do these reshoots.’ And I said, ‘Look, Chuck, naturally I want to do everything I can to help you, but I also have to think about our production. Let me talk to everybody and figure out what the scheduling would be.’ And I went and spoke to Jake Myers, and the suggestion was made through channels that we shave the mustache and Henry could begin to grow the mustache back and that then there would be – they would give us the resources to digitally fill in Henry’s mustache. Because like it or not, a fake mustache in close-up on a 75mm lens is never going to look like anything but a fake mustache.The Henry Cavill Justice League moustache situation was unfortunate, but Warner Bros. has no one to blame but themselves. They had plenty of footage of Henry Cavill as a clean-shaven Superman. For some reason, they elected to reshoot a majority of his scenes while he was shooting another movie where his character had a moustache. Paramount Pictures shouldn’t have had to compromise their movie to help out a competitor who made a bad choice.
Source: Empire
