The reasons for the project collapse were numerous. Fincher's first choice for the lead Brad Pitt changed his mind. Backup choices Daniel Craig and Matt Damon didn't want to be away from their families for at least five months of production.
Fincher considered Channing Tatum but Disney didn't want him--They wanted Chris Hemsworth but Fincher didn't. Ultimately Fincher chose to move onto to adapt "Gone Girl".
Add in the big-budget flops of "John Carter" and "The Lone Ranger," Disney was skiddish to gamble on yet another $200+ million 3D tentpole film adaptation.
Fincher explains:
"You get over $200 million - all motion picture companies have corporate culture and corporate anxieties. Once we got past the list of people we could cast as the different characters in the film, once we got past one or two names which made them very comfortable, making a movie at that price, it became this bizarre endeavour to find which three names you could rub together to make platinum. I wanted Aronnax to be French, God forbid! It got to be a little too confusing to me. I had this argument with a studio executive one time where he said to me, 'why is it that the actors always side with you and we're paying them?' And I said, 'I think it's because at some level, they know that my only real allegiance is to the movie.' And because that's very clear and it never wavers, they may not agree with the image of the movie I have in my head, but they know that's what I'm after. They've seen me for 100 days take the long way around. I think that when you're trying to put together a handful of people to deliver all those facets of humanity and who work well together, it has to be in service of the narrative and not in service of the balance sheet. It became very hard to appease the anxieties of Disney's corporate culture with the list of names that allowed everyone to sleep at night. I just wanted to make sure I had the skill-sets I could turn the movie over to. Not worrying about whether they're big in Japan."
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