Roland Emmerich’s ‘Anonymous,’ Gerald Butler Vehicle ‘Playing The Field,’ Space Actioner ‘Lockout’ All Shuffle Dates
Of all the films to have gone before the cameras this year, Rian Johnson‘s “Looper” is one of our most anticipated. It’s a mindbending, violent time travel thriller, with the best script to date from the man behind “Brick” and “The Brothers Bloom“, and features a top-notch cast including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Jeff Daniels and more. After a fierce bidding war, the project, now in post-production, was snapped up by FilmDistrict, who’ll release the film through their deal with TriStar.
With all going swimmingly, we were ready to sit back and enjoy the wait for the film, quietly crossing our fingers that it might even sneak onto the 2011 release schedule, but TriStar have announced a date, and unfortunately, it’s not going to be this year. In fact, it’ll be quite some way into 2012, with Box Office Mojo revealing that the film has a September 28, 2012 date planned, a whopping fifteen months from now, and Johnson later confirmed it to The Film Stage on Twitter, saying that “I’d love for it to be sooner, but it’s a good date for the movie, hopefully it’ll be worth the wait.” Indeed.
Johnson’s last film, “The Brothers Bloom” also had a long wait before it hit screens, but this seems like a much happier position to be in, and it probably suggests that TriStar and FilmDistrict know they need some time to market a movie slightly off the beaten track, but one that has the potential to be a real crossover hit. We imagine the big reason for the far-off release is to capitalize on Gordon-Levitt’s heat coming off “The Dark Knight Rises,” which opens two months earlier.
FilmDistrict have also moved a few more of their pictures around. The Luc Besson-produced sci-fi actioner “Lockout” — basically “Taken” in space — which stars Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace, Lennie James and Peter Stormare, has moved back a couple of months, from February 24 to April 13, 2012, while the sex and soccer comedy “Playing The Field,” which involves Gerald Butler working through a starry line-up of soccer moms, including Uma Thurman, Jessica Biel, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Judy Greer, and comes from “The Pursuit of Happyness” director Gabriele Muccino, is now slated on March 9th.
In the more immediate future, IFC have moved the Kristin Scott-Thomas French thriller “Love Crime” back a week, to September 2nd, while the disappointing “Brighton Rock” has done the same, moving from August 19th to August 26th. Finally, the flat-out hilarious looking “Anonymous,” which sees “2012” helmer Roland Emmerich tackling the question of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, with the likes of Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, David Thewlis, Edward Hogg, Jamie Campbell-Bower and Rafe Spall, has moved back a whole month, from September 30th to October 28th, a date it shares with another new addition to the schedule, the cult Sundance horror comedy “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil,” starring Alan Tudyck, Tyler Labine and Katrina Bowden, which Magnet, who just acquired the film, will release on the same day, with a VoD release coming sooner, on August 26th.
