It's Crazy That Michel Gondry and Pharrell Williams' Period Musical Golden Was Cancelled and Will Never Be Released, Yet No One Seems to Have Noticed
When I heard that Pharrell Williams was making a documentary populated exclusively by Legos and a movie with Michel Gondry, I naturally assumed they were the same movie.
That Gondry sure is quirky! It would fit his playful, childlike sensibility to make a movie about one of the most successful producers of all time with children’s toys standing in for Pharrell and collaborators like Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes and Jay-Z.
Nope! Despite being made around the same time, the Gondry movie and the Lego movie are different. Won’t You Be My Neighbor and 20 Feet From Stardom director Morgan Neville directed Piece by Piece, a fanciful non-fiction exploration of the ubiquitous hit-maker’s life and career as realized through the world of stackable plastic.
As for the movie that Gondry made with Williams, it will never be released. It’s about to join Batgirl in the great big movie graveyard when it was quietly announced that Gondry and Williams had agreed to shelve a finished twenty-million-dollar coming-of-age story set in 1977 Virginia Beach permanently.
As with Batgirl, the makers broke with tradition and announced that the movie they’d worked long and hard on just wasn’t good enough, and consequently, the public would not have a chance to be horribly disappointed by it.
In a reversal of the usual custom, the filmmakers assured a worried public that they really did not want to see their movie, that it just did not work, and consequently did not merit being seen by anyone.
Gondry and Williams apparently watched their film, then made the difficult choice to seemingly guarantee that their hard work and the hard work of their gifted collaborators would never be seen by anyone, and had no chance whatsoever of becoming even the most modest success.
This shocked me. I found it bewildering. I’m biased, on account of I took advantage of a very short window when the eccentric auteur offered to do portraits for twenty dollars, and consequently have a Gondry hanging proudly on my walls.
Here’s the thing. If the movie that Michel Gondry made with Pharrell Williams is terrible, I went to see it. I REALLY want to see it. If it’s great, I still want to see it. If it’s mediocre, I want to see it.
Regardless of its quality or lack thereof, I want to see the movie that Gondry made with Pharrell Williams because it is a collaboration between Michel Gondry and Pharrell Williams with a cast that includes Andre 3000, Missy Elliott, Bryan Tyree Henry, Janelle Monáe, Tim Meadows, Quinta Brunson, and the confusingly named Halle Bailey.
Michel Gondry is a genius. He is an original. He’s one of the greatest and most original music video auteurs of all time. He is a towering man-child with all the imagination in the world. I can’t imagine a version of Golden that would not be worth seeing.
As with Batgirl, the shelving of Golden just makes me want to see it more. There’s a forbidden appeal to pop culture that we cannot experience, as evidenced by the enduring cult of The Day the Clown Cried.
I have several questions about Golden that I may or may not have answered. Could it really be that bad? Is it being shelved for some weird political or business reason they’re not conceding? Could a movie from the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind really be unreleasable? What went wrong? Whose vision, ultimately, is Golden, and why are they trying to make us think it sucks?
The deep-sixing of Golden hasn’t garnered a fraction of the coverage or attention that Batgirl did, largely due to the superhero angle and Michael Keaton's portrayal of Batman in a ninety-million-dollar movie.
What happened? What went awry? Who is to blame? Are artists responsible or numbers crunchers? Is Gondry’s art becoming another man’s tax write-off?
I’d love to see it for myself to satisfy my curiosity, but the whole point is that that isn’t an option.
I searched for images for this post that might convey the film’s look and feel, but could only find the image below. Golden is already on the verge of disappearing, of having somehow left no cultural impact despite the audacious pairing of Gondry and Williams.
It’s rare, if not wholly unprecedented, for a finished or nearly finished film to get cancelled. Usually it happens, however, with a movie where someone dies before it can be completed, or someone involved has a sex scandal or goes broke.
That does not appear to be the case here. As far as I know, no one involved has died unexpectedly or been disgraced. They’ve just decided that they've made a disappointing film with no future.
It’s possible that Golden will be released at some point, possibly directly to streaming. Coyote v. Acme was famously cancelled in 2023 and existed in a state of limbo before Ketchup Entertainment picked it up for a 2026 release.
Unlike Golden and Batgirl, Coyote v. Acme had good buzz. It wasn’t being shit-canned for quality reasons but rather because the soulless ghoul who runs Warner Bros. was willing to bury a good movie for the sake of a tax write-off.
I hope Golden is released at some point so that we can all see for ourselves whether a Michel Gondry/Pharrell Williams musical could possibly be half as bad/unreleasable as its creators insist.
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