Robbie Williams biopic Better Man ‘ruined’ by Queen Elizabeth’s death

The director of ‘ biopic Better Man has revealed the late ‘s death caused their movie such financial issues it took five months to recover.

Michael Gracey admitted a huge dance sequence set on ‘s Regent Street was almost scrapped completely after news broke of the monarch’s death.

The scene sees a CGI chimpanzee, representing Robbie, singing and dancing through the area with actors playing the other members of Take That. Despite the fact that it is one of Robbie’s solo hits they are performing Rock DJ and in the clip they take over the street with hundreds of other dancers joining in.

“People have no idea how close this sequence came to never happening,” Michael admitted in an interview to promote the movie.

“It was a lot of going down to Regent Street at two in the morning with a handful of dancers and an iPhone and shooting it out and drunk British people yelling, is that for ?” he said.

But once we’d worked out what section of the street we wanted to use, we had to then shut that down. That took a year and a half to get permission to shut down Regent Street for four nights.

“We had to rehearse it outside of Regent Street, because obviously, once we were on Regent Street, we just had to shoot.

“And so we went to a huge studio space and taped out Regent Street – every rubbish bin, every bus stop, every doorway, and we brought in 500 dancers, and we brought in the double decker bus and the taxis, and we rehearsed it all,” he said describing the epic effort which went into pulling the sequence together.

“And then at the end of the week, unfortunately, the Queen passed away. And so when we were meant to be filming, it was 10 days of mourning for the death of the Queen.”

The knock-on effect of this was that the funding to shoot the scenes was already swallowed up meaning they had to raise new finance.

“We lost the entire budget because we’d already paid for all the gear and all the people and all the shops. And so it wasn’t until another five months later that we raised the money again, got back onto Regent Street and shot that sequence.

“So every time I watch it, I’m like people have no idea how close this sequence came to never happening,” he said.

The movie has proved a hit with UK adiences and . However, despite a massive publicity push by Robbie it has

It has failed to connect with viewers across the Atlantic, grossing a disappointing $1.1million (£908k) overseas so far.