A new trailer has emerged for Peter Weir‘s “The Way Back,” and it makes the strongest case yet that the film could be a very late contender in this year’s Oscar race.
Starring Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, Mark Strong and Saoirse Ronan, the epic follows group of seven prisoners who escape a Siberian labor camp in 1940 and attempt to trek thousands of miles across hostile terrain to India and their freedom. And yeah, it definitely has the widescreen vista adventure vibe down pat. The film landed a distribution deal with tiny Newmarket Films and as such, it’s being very selectively screened due to the limited marketing budget at the film’s disposal. For instance, New York critics will not see the film before the end of the year, only west coast folks (and more importantly, Academy members) will have the privilege. Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics will all apparently see the film before year’s end as well.
But who cares about those fussy critics, when are the rest of us gonna get a look? The film opens in Los Angeles on December 29th and then will go wide on 500 screens on January 21st. We presume the rollout strategy will heavily depend on how well the picture fares when the Oscar nominations are announced at the end of the month. You can check out the trailer after the jump:
