This article is comedy gold!

Epic funding fail with Branagh and DDL; second epic fail with TH and DL.
KB and DDL fighting for the limelight.
Project is box office poison even with DL attached (and even after Billions, Homeland etc)

The market is saying something and JI secretly knows what that is. Ishmael Merchant was a great producer and the hard headed money man who got the funding in place and made Merchant Ivory a success. I have long suspected that Hollywood was only ever interested in them as a pair, and now JI admits as much: "Merchant died in 2005, but Ivory said: “Had he been around, [Richard II] would have been made. We don’t have a really good producer like Ismail.” That I think is the key to why this is not giving the money men of Hollywood a stiffie.