I really, really, really don’t want Great Gatsby coverage to be a piece with World War Z. I know it’s too early to suggest that and, yeah, that trailer looked very pretty and very expensive — not to mention, like an interesting visualization of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s literary tropes — so there’s reason to maintain hope.

Still. Yours truly raised a mental red flag when Warner Bros. delayed its release by about six months or so; we didn’t know why, but we could always suspect why. (Unless you take the word of the brass at face value.) Now, a report in The Herald (via ThePlaylist) brings news that Baz Luhrmann‘s “embarking on a private capital-raising venture” which would allow him to truly “complete” the project, with money being funneled toward additional shooting in Australia. That is, because Warner Bros. aren’t interested in contributing any further funds toward Gatsby.

So, I don’t know. Maybe the thing just needs a little under-the-hood work in order to finally click — but that does make you wonder why the studio won’t throw something extra his way. This is not an end-all, be-all answer, yet The Herald claims Warner Bros, in thinking it can’t pull anything big at the Oscars next year, are “now just hoping to capitalise on big summer audiences.”

To me, that says a good deal about where the film stands now, where Luhrmann might want to take it, and how his intentions — tenuous and unclear as they may be — could change the final result. Right now, we’ve been given too little with which to make a real guess. Fingers crossed, nevertheless.

Does this news give you pause about The Great Gatsby? What have your expectations been like?