There’s a rumor floating around right now that the Jim Henson Company has put The Power of the Dark Crystal, their Dark Crystal sequel, on hold. Let’s start this off right by making it clear right now that this is absolutely untrue. There’s nothing to it, and from what I can tell it’s something made up by the new crop of movie blogs which float around out there making their way by inventing rumors to get traffic. It’s become an epidemic folks, and this is just one of the many symptoms.
Unfortunately, the rumor has caught on like wildfire. It’s all over the internet being reported as fact. It even made it on to basic cable in G4’s “The Feed”. One small problem though: Apparently no one bothered to check with the Jim Henson Company before reporting this thing as fact. It’s not even hard, they have their media relations contact information pretty easily available on their official site.
But no one bothered.
Alright I can live with not checking with them for some sort of confirmation, but how about not reporting this story as the truth when you have absolutely no idea whether or not it is? Or maybe letting people know your source for it was an anonymous email from someone you don’t know anything about? See, I got exactly the same email all these other people did last week. It was a shady looking, anonymous email mass spammed to a bunch of different sites which basically said that The Dark Crystal 2 had been put on hold and that director Genndy Tartakovsky and the Henson Company had decided to can it.
When I asked the Jim Henson Company if there was any truth to it, here’s what they said: “There is absolutely no merit to this report at all…and I’d love to get to the source if possible so I can try to set the record straight (although as I am sure you know, once the horse is out of the barn with stuff like this it’s hard to correct). No one has contacted me for a comment and I just spoke with our head of features who knew nothing of any changes to the project.” That’s straight from the Jim Henson Company’s Head of Publicity. I think she’d know.
Does that mean the movie absolutely will get made? No, it simply means that for now it’s not dead and that this particular rumor is a bunch of hot air. Consider it the rumor canned. Dark Crystal 2 is alive and well until the Henson Company says it isn’t.
