The saga of the Maze Runner: The Death Cure production continues. Filmmakers have decided to switch up locations for the post-apocalyptic action flick. Actor Dylan O’Brien will now be leading his band of maze survivors across South Africa instead of British Columbia. Sources say the change is a question of timing and weather.
Filming on the Twentieth-Century Fox production halted in March after an injury during a stunt sidelined O’Brien. Early reports suggested that filming would resume later in the spring, but when it became evident that O’Brien would need more time to recover, the production in Canada shut down completely. The studio pushed the movie’s release by almost a year, and Death Cure remained in limbo until this month.
Filming Resumes in February
Deadline first reported that the film would resume production in February. Twentieth-Century Fox won’t confirm that. They say they’ll make a statement in due course. A senior film industry source in Canada, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the schedule and told the Globe and Mail that production would not return to British Columbia in February. Instead, filming will resume in South Africa.
Early speculation suggested the move away from Canada was to get away from British Columbian safety authorities, WorkSafe BC. That is apparently not the case. While the investigation into the Dylan O’Brien accident turned up evidence that the production did not follow safety protocols and pushed the actor into a stunt without proper rehearsal, there were no real repercussions for the failure.
The change in locale is apparently a matter of climate as South Africa will be heading into autumn in February. The climate isn’t a close approximation of the Canadian spring they left but should be a temperate enough replacement. In recent years, large studios and sound stages popped up in South Africa and the burgeoning film industry there can easily handle a large-scale action movie like Death Cure.
Initially, the film, the third in The Maze Runner series, would’ve hit theaters in February. The current release date is January of 2018.
