How is this news? Already known since last year.
Sorry. Just posting what I hear/find 
and the last post in here is more than 2 years old,
It’s a new article, which is weird. Anyway, Franco Nero is still alive, so technically it’s still possible. But really, how hard is it to make a low budget movie? That shouldn’t take 3 fuckin’ years, now should it.
Sayles was attached to write the script last year. He’s now also sign on to direct, that’s the news. The film didn’t have a director last year. Now with a name director nontheless it should probably move into production soon.
Maybe next they will say the producer left or have no composer 
John Sayles is retweeting the various news reports on his own Twitter feed, so maybe it’s got some legs this time.
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I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything by John Sayles. What’s his work like?
The ones I’ve seen are mostly understated and character driven. He was an indie darling in the 80s and 90s. Check out Lone Star, it’s a modern western and his masterpiece no doubt.
The film had a director attached from early 2013 to late 2014. When it was decided, by the producers, that the attached director had “no name value” they dumped him and courted Sayles for nearly a year before he was officially announced as “screenwriter”. He (Sayles) Worked on the existing screenplay by making some superficial changes (Django is now a technician on BIRTH OF A NATION rather than just a technician for general westerns. D.W. Griffith’s movie actually played an important role in the original screenplay. Other tweaks were made like changing a group of minorities from a racial group to an ethnicity).
As for the budget— The initial intention of the original director and writers (and Franco) was to make the film a low-budget affair. Once the producers hopped on they insisted this be a multi-millionaire dollar feature, which has since contributed to the massive hold up of this project. When no investor bit at the enormous price tag the producers blamed the script for the hold up even though they signed up for the project because of the screenplay. And the proof is in the pudding. The screenplay has survived the originators of the project (who still hold producer credits) and made it to the final stages of Sayles’s mighty red pen. I think it’s safe to say the script was perfectly fine. Let’s just say there were ulterior motives for blaming the screenplay.
What’s been holding this project back for so long has been the insistence on a very large (for what it is) budget. Not particularly prudent. But deep pockets will always trump good sense.
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While film-buffs tend to have favorite directors whose films they will see regardless, your average movie-goer focuses much more on actors than anything else. If you asked your average person to name their 10 favorite actors they would have no trouble; naming their 10 favorite directors would be far more challenging. If we took it to the level of other crew members like favorite cinematographers or editors, then I think most people would be hard pressed to name even one. Perhaps the producers are just courting film-buffs in this case, but then you imply that money is what matters more to them here.
I actually wrote a paper on that in school after having a conversation in a group about Burn After Reading and discovering that I was the only person who knew who the Coen brothers were. Everyone else just thought of it as a Brad Pitt film.
Seems like it lives
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Good news. Originally I was against bringing the character back but after a while the idea grew on me, I still haven’t seen Django 2 though (I’ve been avoiding it tbh) and I doubt that’d get me more excited from what I’ve heard.
Some updates
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Now COVID-19 is blamed for the delay, really?
What next Django Lives for 5 mins then dies of Covid…
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